Don’t you just wish you could go back to the days of the Founding Fathers? Hmm…well, I guess if you are a white Protestant male landowner. It wouldn’t be so nice if you were African-American, a woman, a religious minority, or poor. While I think the Founding Fathers were brilliant men and really set up a very good system of government, let’s not deify them.
The problem with glorifying past is that we tend to remember the good things and we completely forget the bad things. It is a nice line to talk about “government intrusion”, but let’s not forget the days before government intrusion-when big business owners could treat their workers however they pleased. I think if we had to choose between the two, we would certainly choose our current system over theirs.
We can complain and bicker about the welfare state, but let’s not forget the days before government assistance when a hard time could literally lead people to starvation and homelessness much more easily than today. If you got sick, you were in for even more problems-especially if you were poor or had an hourly wage job.
We clamor about the government taking away our rights. However, if you had lived in the South during this time, you could have been arrested for marrying someone of an “inferior” race. You could be openly discriminated against if you were a member of a different faith and even the mere right to vote was denied to the vast majority of people in the nation. Of course, if you were African-American or Native American you had next to no rights at all.
While people are out clamoring about the Tea Party and the evils of government intrusion, let’s take a little time to remember the true History of the nation. The overwhelming white Tea Party movement can clamor about “losing their country”, but it doesn’t provide a true narrative of the history of the nation. Personally, I would much rather be living under the Presidency of Barack Obama than John Adams or George Washington any day, no matter how brilliant those men were. The reality is that the members of the Tea Party would to. Let’s honor the positive things in the past without glorifying it and forgetting how far we have progressed.
