HOPES FOR A MEANINGFUL SECOND AMERICAN REVOLUTION

(dissolving into the sound and fury of a tea party signifying….nothing)

Earlier this year we saw and heard loud and heated outbursts from the mass of this country’s taxpaying voters. They were fed up. They were angry, and, like the villagers in the Frankenstein story, they were ready to surround the Capitol Building, in Washington D.C. with pitchforks and torches….to clear out all the career political dingbats there, whom they perceived as the source of all their economic woes and other miseries.

For a brief and shining moment there was the hope that a meaningful second American Revolution (by the ballot, not the bullet), was about to happen. Among other iconic elements of our first revolution being invoked at the time, none seemed more powerful and stirring than the Boston Tea Party affair, as the epitome of how the people could voice their discontent with the status quo. And so the march of today’s Tea Party began.

Unfortunately, along the way, what began as a real hope for such a revolution has simply dissolved into the sound and fury of a tea party signifying….nothing. What began with what seemed like the transformation of the “silent majority” into a truly “radical center”, now realizing that it represented the mass of voters inhabiting the broad central mesa of our electorate, for which neither the Democrats nor the Republicans were doing anything to support its interests; and, that the only way to achieve real “change” was to start replacing them with real “independent” candidates unaffiliated with either of those two major parties. But it was not meant to be.

What has happened, instead, is that the extreme elements of both of those parties have marched us right off that broad central mesa of commonsense and pragmatic values, into the deep canyons of ideology. The Tea Party, promoting Republicans of the ideological right, with the Democrats continuing to sink further into the ideological left.

Well, perhaps there is still some hope, some spark, of non-lemming “independence” of mind left within our silent majority. Enough of it so that it will finally realize that neither of these two major parties are working for its interests, and it’s time to jolt them both with a big November surprise. That is, instead of voting for the same old party hacks and career politicos, spending their lifetimes feeding at the trough of public service, it will vote in a lot of truly independent candidates to take their place.

We can dream….can’t we?

CENTURION