POLITICS IS NO PARTY
by Elizabeth T. Andrews
American Reporter Correspondent
Cartersville, Ga.
Printable version of this story
CARTERSVILLE, Ga. -- Are you having a hard time focusing your eyes? Do you have faint red spots all over your body? Is there a ringing in your ears and do you see wavy lines when you look at your television set? Do your hands shake when you try to hold a cup of coffee? And have you recently been forgetting what day of the week it is - or what year?
Fear not. You have a severe case of political-itis ... an allergic reaction to too much exposure to politicians on the campaign trail. Come November, 2008 your skin disorders will vanish, your ears will stop ringing, your vision will right itself and your hands will stop shaking.
Meanwhile, unless you go find a barn in the country, climb up to the loft and sleep there until the end of November, you will just have to endure your allergy.
But do try to avoid and personal contact with politicians mouthing polished platitudes like "Home of the free, land of the gullible - er, I mean brave." Or millionaire politicians pretending to be poor:
"Why, I'm just the son of a poor ol' coal miner who worked hard all his life just like you." Or politicians running for President who perfect the lies they told yesterday until you think you're hearing something newly wonderful. All of them would be squeezed to death by God if God loved hypocrites, liars and thieves.
Let's define and compare the only two political parties allowed by one huge, slick political machine that ensures Democrats and Republicans don't have to run against:
A Libertarian platform of "We despise big government."
A Greenpeace environmental truth-telling Party: "If we don't change our wasteful ways we are all going to die."
A People's Party pasted together by those who issue proclamations like "When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to fix a bloated, blood-sucking, malfunctioning federal government we, the people, recommend all taxpaying citizens not file personal income taxes on April 15th. Let us send a pocketbook-piercing message that "We, the people, know what you have done, what you are doing, and we are not going to help you do it anymore."
And on to the glossy, human-less, well-oiled two-party political machine.
The Republican Party: Home of white males who treasure "The way it has always been." They long for a time of "Remember when... ." Remember when women knew their place and served us well at home, in our offices and places of worship? Remember when women wore dresses, did not have opinions on anything more serious than what brand of diapers to buy, and they met us at our front doors each evening with an apron on, our favorite cocktail in one hand and our pipe and slippers in the other?
Remember when, just a few years ago, we finally allowed black men to vote and we blinked and there they were thinking they could run for a local, state or even federal office just like good ol' white boys? That's gratitude for you. And remember when we decided years ago that we have to look the other way while all them illegal people keep pouring across our southern border? My wife would kill me if I signed a bill that would ship her live-in maid back to Mexico, even though we have to hide her in the basement every time company comes over.
Republicans - especially men - defend "the right to keep and bear arms" as though it ranks right up there with "Thou shall not kill." After all, what better way for a man to prove he is a man than to have a den with dead deer heads hanging all over the walls and a gun rack so full it would make a radical Muslim terrorist envious. And don't worry about defending the homeland.
We're working on a granddaddy of all bombs that will make the mother of all bombs look like a baby's teething ring. People must be controlled by fear and intimidation, and the flaunting of enough nuclear power to blast us all into the Milky Way. That's what real men do. Threaten and control. Any man worth his beer knows that.
And then there are Republican women who think "free woman" is a dirty phrase invented by masculine, motorcycle-riding women who wouldn't know how to open a can and bake a biscuit if they were starving to death. Traditional Republican women think equality means working outside the home if you aren't getting any child support but it is not very lady-like and good wives and mothers don't do it.
Such women frequently see nothing wrong with taking out the church trash and putting the song books back in their holders while the men are having a meeting to decide when the women can hold a bake sale and what kind of cookies they can bring.
I recently met a witty, intelligent Mormon man who very gently explained to me that all groups must have structure; that inside his church's structure women have certain roles and men have certain roles and there is no inequality. Let's see if I've got it, said I. You and I are married. We live together, play together, go to church together, raise our children together ... and you get to call all the shots ... and that makes us equal.
I could write a book about his response.
The Democratic Party, on the other hand, spawns goggle-eyed, idealistic, well-intentioned liberals like a Hillary Clinton and a Barack Obama. They misspend a political lifetime believing they should be their brother's keeper - even if he doesn't want to be kept. They cry loudly about "progress and equal rights for all," never digesting that a truly free capitalistic society puts as much emphasis on opportunities as it does on rights.
Meanwhile, black churches, black schools and black neighborhoods stay primarily black, and many of our black brothers have opted to become Islamics as that religion offers them what passes as respect albeit at the oppression of their women.
And a Southern white Baptist church would never grant pastorship to Hillary even if she promised they could barbecue Bill on Easter Sunday. God is, after all, a white male.
Democrats in government practice politicking by promising a dollar for anyone, anywhere, anytime that needs a helping hand. Never mind that it is your dollar. The bad news gets worse because for every dollar promised to a hungry sick old man living in one room, only half a penny of your dollar will reach him.
The rest goes to help pay for campaign expenses like Hillary's $25,000 for luxury rooms at the Bellagio in Las Vegas; $5 million in January alone for political advice, and about $95,000 for deli sandwiches and Dunkin' Donuts.
Maybe they had some doughnuts left over to give to the little old man.
Democrats believe "It takes a village to raise a child," meaning the government gets to interfere in your parenting at home, at any public school, child-care facility, government-owned park, playground or public toilet. And, yes, I agree that there are parents out there - or next door - who don't have enough gumption to raise a gerbil, but it is for families and churches and communities to protect our children, not the state and federal governments.
Republicans, on the other hand, believe a white daddy gets to dictate to a submissive white mama how to raise his children, and a black daddy has to be absent from his child's home else mama can't get any of the good ol' white boys idea of compassion: public welfare.
Lest you think I exaggerate, explore the beginnings of our current welfare insanity and you will find it was born, not out of compassion, but to keep the black man in his demeaning place by offering beans, rice, a do-fer shack and toilet paper to his woman and their children. Better that, snickered the good ol' white boys in Washington, D.C. (and points state-ward), than having to work alongside him, live next door to him, or allow him to think a black man is as good as a white man.
Have you ever asked yourself what the black man was supposed to do in those early years when the American welfare system was invented? He wasn't allowed to live with his woman and his children; wasn't allowed to work beside a white brother, and when he finally got to live in a white suburban neighborhood it was by getting a disgusted-with-racial-inequality white person to buy the house for him and his family - and then sell it to him.
Oh, but those are yesterday's sins, you say. And I will respond that out of those actions lacking in long-range plans for self-government comes the Hillarys and the Baracks who have felt the sting of oppression, discrimination and the ungodly discounting of their personal worth. Out of such been-there, suffered-that misguided socialistic ideas dependency on the system is birthed, forgetting that what individuals get for nothing they place a nothing value on.
If you own the pond, the fishing rod and the bait you cannot teach me how to fish for myself. It is in that crippling attitude that Democrats fail to recognize government should simply protect constitutional rights and then get out of the way and let the private sector provide a patchwork of opportunities for all those willing to reach for them.
What does all that have to do with the wavy lines before your eyes, your growing insomnia, your sense of being slightly hypnotized and unable to function?
Understanding, defining, examining, questioning and daring to challenge everything we think we know, every label we think represents what we think we know, every "party' that is grandaddy's party and therefore must be all right, every slippery word that falls so sweetly from a politicians tongue - the courage to examine any or all of these will quicken the healing of political-itis, and restore your right to abide peacefully in your own little domicile.
Abide peacefully, that is, until the government padlocks it for non-payment of the Political Tax. That's the unquestioned right of politicians to draw their hefty salaries even though they are absent from their jobs; the right of politicians to live it up in Las Vegas, pay millions to their henchmen for advice and feast off deli sandwiches and Dunkin' Donuts worth $95,000, while the little man in his one little room turns off the heat because he can't afford it.
And as he eats his supper he carefully puts aside half of his last package of ramen noodles for breakfast.
AR Correspondent Elizabeth T. Andrews is based in Cartersville, Ga. Her Website features her columns and poetry. Write her at angels@treefamilyfoundation, or at P.O. Box 816, Cartersville, GA 30120.
Copyright 2008 Joe Shea The American Reporter. All Rights Reserved.