Well, we are halfway out of this default crisis that WE (yes, we with a capital W and E) have placed ourselves in. If the Senate passes the "deal", which in my own inexpert opinion looks more like a capitulation of the President and a nearly unprecedented cock-up of our constitutional system (how can the minority party, with a hold on only 1 house of government, hold the entire nation hostage? Is that the way it is supposed to work? Then again, George Washington himself was kind of sort of hoping we'd have no parties at all....), we will avoid default.
About the only good thing to come out of this is that Gabrielle Giffords has returned, miraculously, to the House and cast her fist vote since surviving a horrific attack.
I will say one thing; we have seen hard headed idealism at its finest. Never mind the fact that the founding fathers were certainly idealistic enough to embark on an Independence movement to secure their rights, but not idealistic enough to end Slavery. Never mind that the constitution itself, which some people think must have been written by God himself, is really a hodge-podge of compromises hammered out between excellent, though fallible, men. Nope, the entire nation has been held hostage to prove a point. And that point seems to be the Government is awful, and taxes are the Devil himself.
Point taken, Republicans. I've learned a valuable lesson here, and I agree with you; taxes are awful. So I'm going to stop paying mine.
However, it only seems fair that if I am not going to be paying taxes, then I should no longer be using government services. After all, I am not a freeloader (Benjamin Franklin on the other hand...sheesh).
So I guess that means I will stop using our nation's highways and roadways. But that's okay, because I like walking. And if someone comes up to me and demands my money or my life, I'll shoot him in the knee caps and hang him myself. Vigilante justice was good enough for Dodge City, and its good enough here too.
I will try to put out the fire with water from the water hose...but that's right, I can't use the town's water services anymore because I refuse to help maintain them. Guess my house will just have to burn to the ground now. Education? I believe in the self-made man. I got an Encyclopedia Britannica in the garage...which has just burned down now. Shit. Guess I'll have to buy a new one. Hope the bookstore takes gold ingots as currency. If not, than maybe silver will do?
Look, I think you get my drift. I don't disagree that budgets need to be cut, and I for one am wholeheartedly in favor of some kind of entitlement reform. Programs set up in the 1930s just don't work very well in 2011. We should change them. Then again, ideas that worked in the 1780s also sometimes don't work very well in 2011, and while history is great I think maybe we need to cling less to aged ideals with sometimes debatable merit and look for solutions that make more sense today.
Remember that some of the greatest things we've ever done as a nation, from the Battle of Yorktown to the Emancipation of slaves to the liberation of France and the Marshall Plan to the moon landings to the end of the Cold War, were done with massive amounts of tax payer dollars. Some people say perhaps we shouldn't have done some of those things. I'd say its all money well spent.
Enough is enough. Next election cycle, I intend to look past the idealist and try to find more of a pragmatist. I hope many of my fellow Americans will do the same.
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