Tea party movement needs to be crushed into oblivion

I was a kid during World War II. My Daddy had a victory garden. We crushed cans for scrap drives. We took “Is this trip necessary?” seriously. Our lives were driven by “the war effort.” We were patriotic. Our country called, and we answered. We didn’t just wave flags.

I’m still patriotic today. For me, America is Ronald Reagan’s shining city on a hill. I’m proud that my son is a diplomat representing his country well to the world. The Founding Fathers got it right.

When I read history, though, I’m not proud of some things we did as a people: slavery, our Indian policy, Jim Crow. And also the 70 years after the Industrial Revolution when American workers were crushed into awful poverty by robber baron capitalists ─ and government backed them with National Guard troops and machine guns (for example, Google “horse creek mill strike”).

I feel great pride in America when I look back on times when we followed our greatness ─ when Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery, when Franklin Roosevelt liberated American workers, when Harry Truman airlifted to besieged Berlin and did away with segregation in the military, when John Kennedy gave us a vision for space travel, when the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in schools and Lyndon Johnson followed with civil rights legislation, when Richard Nixon gave us clean air and water, when the U.S. military brings relief to earthquake and tsunami victims.

I write this today because America stands at a crossroads. Do we go forward to greater glory, or do we slide backward?

At issue is the Tea Party. I hear and read their words, and I’m puzzled. They constantly say that government is treading on their liberty, and they want “freedom.”

But the world they say they want has already been tried ─ back in the dark time when bankers and industrialists did whatever they pleased with their workers, with the nation’s economy and with God’s earth. And government either stood silently by or was an accomplice.

If the Tea Party were to succeed ─ electing a Republican governor and legislature, U.S. president and Congress ─ there would be a great irony. They would get their wish to be free of government, but they wouldn’t get the freedom they want. Instead, they would take on a crueler master: big business. Without government as a check to protect the people, big business owns government. Read the newspaper every day with news from Raleigh ─ how different business groups dictate to docile Tea Party Republicans the laws that give corporations all the freedom they want.

If the Tea Party continues to urge us back toward our dark past, then it will be my patriotic duty to work extra hard to clobber them into oblivion in November.