The Tea Party and The Three Billy Goats Gruff

 If you live long enough, everything you have ever read comes in useful at some point. I was an avid reader of Greek myths and children's fairy tales, and I have finally come across a use for the story about how three goats managed to fool an ogre living under a bridge they wanted to cross. I mentioned this in my last blog and the more I thought about it, the more the story seemed a good parallel for today's politics.

But first some background. One of my contacts on facebook is almost a charter member of the Tea Party. Over the time I was on his friends list, he forwarded cartoons, rages, and rants from various sources, mostly attacking Obama but also taking on the general universe of "liberals" by which they seemed to mean anybody who disagreed with them. After a while, I got bored and unfriended him.

Recently, he send me another friends invitation. I debated a while before accepting. I really didn't want anymore cartoons about growing water melons on the White House lawn. With the passage of time, I wondered if the party had begun to substitute electability for howls of outrage. I lobbed a few grenades into the comments section: i.e. I started asked where the statistics had come from. I can now safely report that I have been called a liberal (which I am not really) and directed to go read the "evidence" for myself, which generally consisted of so-called surveys and studies from very right-leaning organizations--the kind I would trust no further than I would a study from MSNBC (which openly admits to being out there purely for fun and outrage).

So--no. Nothing had changed on the tea party front. Same old. I unfriended again. Nothing against him except his politics.

So what it is that irks me so much about the Tea Party? Well, I guess I see them as the ogre under the bridge.

It seems to me that successful politics, the kind I define as moving a nation forward in some way and improving the collective lot of its citizens is composed of two major parts: knowledge of the past and some intuition about the future, particularly some form of anticipating the outcomes, intended and otherwise, of particular policies. In other words memory and imagination.

The Tea Party is strong on memory. They feel that the past is the bastion of all that was ever good about this county and only a return to it will launch us into a future that is changing daily before our eyes.

Essentially, the past is the Tea Party.

Where they are woefully lacking is in imagination. By this, I mean that they are unwilling to consider or they don't even see the  consequences of the ideology that drives them to want to destroy government. They can't imagine the future. They find it impossible to see that the world has changed unimaginably in the last fifty years and that there is no way back even if the majority of this country wanted it.

End Obamacare? Be prepared to deal with the furious medical-industrial complex that has invested in the new plans. And if the drowned refugee child created international distress, wait until it is a dead American child who could not get medical treatment because his family lost insurance.

Deport all the illegals and build a wall? Even Alcatraz was breached, so will every wall the US builds. Besides, many of those illegals have families in the US that they are trying to get to. Our policy to have Mexico discourage people from south American countries is going to be the next scandal since there are some genuine refugees that are being brutally killed along the way.

End all abortions? I nearly fell out of my chair when I heard Dr. Carson propose this. Even when I was of childbearing age, there was always a clause about saving a woman's life.

Shut down the government and stonewall budgets? Does the party really want to return this country to barter? Don't they realize that a lot of people are going to get very angry? And don't forget, these people are all now armed.

I could go on, but I won't. I want to get to the Billy Goats Gruff.

Right now, as I said, I see the Tea Party as an obstacle to building the future we need as a nation. They are the ogre under the bridge and only the very cleverest of billy goats can get past them. What a waste of time.

Today we are faced with a mass migration of people, probably among the largest movements since people moved out of Africa. These people are coming from the Middle East and South America and are not going back. It remains to be seen how the world's richest nations deal with a humanitarian crisis of this magnitude.

Today, whether we realize it or not, we are fighting WWIII in the Middle East. Eventually, the fight against radical ideologies will encompass us all and it will take generations to settle. Will it involve nuclear weapons? We must all hope not.

Today, we face changing weather patterns, whether natural or not, that may threaten our water and food supplies and may even lead to an invasion of this country by hungry, desperate people. How do we deal with this?

In the face of all this, what is the Tea Party worrying about? Whether the world they "leave" their children is the same one they grew up in. No, it won't be, I want to yell back at them. It won't even be the world we now live in. And, frankly, isn't that rather wonderful?