This is how a filmmaker friend of mine in Atlanta described the recent Tea Party Election:
"It's pretty remarkable and disheartening that the people at the bottom of the food chain are jumping on the tea party bandwagon, as if lower taxes on corporations and billionaires, a Somalia-like reduction in government services, and a theocracy are magically going to improve our economic prospects."
The danger is that a growing fear of, and alienation from, the rest of the world, especially the former "developing world," will contribute to the feeling in America that we are losing ground and on a slippery slope to disaster. In this sense, one can see the right wing Tea Party Movement as a desperate attempt to hold onto a glorious past.
If this is true, if what we fear is that we are no longer who we once were or who we thought we once were -- ignoring the real problems because they are uncomfortable only makes those problems worse and the day of reckoning more nightmarish.
If we continue to spend 59% of our treasure on military adventures that is invest in more and better weapons and a reliance on violence to try to hold onto the past if that's what we're about, we're in real trouble as a nation.
The dumb lunacy of Tea Baggers aside, long-term security can only come from creating jobs, improving education, fixing up our crumbling infrastructure and investing in a domestic "Marshall Plan" to be totally reliant on alternative energies within, say, ten years.
Basically that means becoming realistic, humble and sane and thinking about the United States as a society, not as a place to plunder. I just saw the infuriating documentary film "Inside Job" which makes the case that unregulated finance industry pirates got us into the mess we're in by seeing America as a place that protected their amoral urge to plunder.
The Tea Bag Movement is only going to encourage more of this behavior. It's a road to Hell.
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