War of 2012

It took me a couple days to digest the so-called “Debt Deal” and I am disappointed.  I take solace that the content of the debate has changed somewhat if not the actual results.  Since the Deal gets all the politicians through to their next election, I am anxiously awaiting the 2012 elections.  The debate will be about the debt and how it should be dealt with.  The American people are well aware that our spending can not continue the way it has and that something of substance must be done in order to corral it.

The electoral war of 2012 has few parallels with the War of 1812, but James Madison, our president at that time, had many views that strike a cord today.  Madison said:

Crisis is the rallying cry of the tyrant.

It can not have passed anyone’s notice that we have been fluttering from one crisis to the next.  Housing crisis, financial crisis, job crisis, debt ceiling crisis… Are we so easily led that the uttering of the word crisis leaves us all wringing our hands and waiting for our elected officials to save us?  It is not by accident that these crises seem to often present themselves.  Madison cautioned:

…the mild voice of reason, pleading the cause of an enlarged and permanent interest, is but too often drowned, before public bodies as well as individuals, by the clamors of an impatient avidity for immediate and immoderate gain.

That is precisely what we received here.  Another crisis averted with a rushed vote for an immediate and immoderate solution where only the symptom was treated and the disease rages on.  We still have this humongous debt hanging over our heads, and the only cuts were to future deficits, meaning we will still be operating at a deficit each year, but just a smaller one.  The only way we can pay off our debt is to run budget surpluses.  The only way we will run budget surpluses is to drastically cut spending.  We can not tax ourselves out of this situation.  The only way to ensure we will drastically cut spending is to continue voting out the career politicians and vote in new ones who prescribe to a Tea Party way of thinking.  One Madison quote gives me hope:

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

Although the mainstream media has been distorting the facts, and the established career politicians have demagogued the Tea Party incessantly, the advancement of alternative news sources through the internet has started to level the political field.  It allows each of us to take a few extra minutes of our day to truly educate ourselves on the challenges facing our country and then share that information with coworkers, friends, and family.  When we do this, we give our country some hope of reversing the tyranny that has been encroaching upon us.