Posted by
flagwaver on Tuesday, March 24, 2009 9:12:25 AM
There are days when I have no idea what is happening to the place I call home, and that is scary. Not to make light of a serious illness, but this must be a small measure of what it feels like to have dementia; I am able to recall things that happened in the past and enjoy them immensely, but if I look around right now I have no idea where I am or what's going on.
I remember a time when poorly run businesses were allowed to simply fail, to file for bankruptcy protection, and to either start anew or close the doors. No industry or individual business was deemed "too big to fail"; if you failed, you failed. The government was not stepping into the fray to rescue you. Ask all of the airlines that had to go through either Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 bankruptcies, or ask the people at Chrysler who once stared bankruptcy in the face and came away reborn. Then we had people like Ronald Reagan in politics and entreprenuers like Lee Iacocca in the business world to make it all work. Now we have Barack Obama and Tim Giethner whose every waking moment seems to be spent planning a deeper government involvement in the private sector economy. And in case you missed the memo, that's not a good thing.
I remember a time when criminals got their just desserts, but the public focused their ire on real criminals...not law abiding citizens who accepted their agreed upon pay. We used to have politicians who at least paid lip service to the law and pretended to allow the Constitution to guide their legislative acts; even if they did something that was unconstitutional, they at least had the decency to try to hide it. Now we have senators announcing their intention to willfully subvert the Constitution in front of television cameras, and a legislative body that actually did subvert the Constitution in the light of day...and none of them thought twice about it. And sadly, too many of us ignored the sheer lawlessness of their action and focused instead on the amount of money they were seeking to recover. We are more worried about quantifying how much money was to be illegally seized from law abiding citizens than the fact that money was going to be illegally seized in the first place.
I remember a time when the will of the people mattered in politics. A person holding elective office was allowed to do the job they were elected for, and no one tried to appoint someone to the take their responsibilities. But here in the Great State of North Carolina, our new Democratic governor, Beverely Perdue is doing just that. She and a band of her political cronies have decided that the governor should appoint a CEO of the board of public instruction and empower that person to basically run the state school system. The only problem with that is that we elect the person that does that job and never has that been challenged. But like so many of her Democratic counterparts Bev Perdue has decided that whatever puts more power into her hands is right and anything standing in her way is wrong. Hopefully the court case brought by the officially elected supervisor of our public instruction board is successful in thwarting this usurpation of constitutional authority by Governor Perdue.
And I remember when laws that were passed usually had some logic to them, especially when they were in related fields. For example, you would rarely see laws that governed the availability of say, alcohol that were contradictory. You would not see a law that prohibited the sale of alcohol to minors on the books, while another that allowed the sale of beer to minors existed at the same time. But that has changed in this country, and it has changed big time! I heard on the local NPR station today about a case where the FDA was being ordered to allow the over-the-counter sale of a particular "morning after contraceptive" to 17 year old minors, with a suggestion that all age restrictions be removed. Nevermind the blatant hypocrisy of the judge lamenting the politicization of the FDA in this particular policy while he legislates his particular political outcome from the bench; this about how utterly incongruous this law is when you look at other laws restricting the sale of certain drugs over-the-counter. For example, while the judge is ordering that the "morning after contraceptive" be sold to any seventeen year old who asks for it (and any other age if he has his way), I have to provide my driver license information, home phone number, and email address to the local pharmacy just to buy allergy medicine that has pseudoephedrine in it! But it is okay to sell minors, who legally cannot even consent to sexual activity by the way, a freaking contraceptive... while I have to jump though hoops to get some Sudafed!
It is amazing how topsy turvy this state has gone (state in the internation relations sense), and many days I wake up wondering where in the blue hell I am. Did I go through the looking glass, over the rainbow, or through the wardrobe? Or did I just wake up in an America that is being turned into Europe, even as Europe is in its death throes? Where am I and how can I get home?