An open letter to the Tea Partiers

I might well be flying in the face of conventional wisdom here, trying to reason with people who are generally considered to be unreasonable and irrational.  But it occurs to me that at least some of us are coming from the same place initially, in that we're sick of the status quo and want to see meaningful change that doesn't involve selling us out to multinational corporations and Wall Street.

Am I wrong?

Many of you, like us, are angered by the Wall Street bailout.  They gambled with our money, lost it, then turned around and extorted it back out of our government--out of our taxes--by threatening to take the whole economy down with them.  Infuriating, right?

We're on the same page here, believe me.  Now what I'm asking you to do is to stretch your imagination a little.  Imagine for a minute--just a minute--that there may be an element of truth in the things I'm about to share with you.  Imagine for a moment that the people who you currently get your information from are misinformed or just plain wrong.  I know it's a stretch, but I have faith that you can do it.

Now you've been led to believe that FOX News is the only source of news that isn't slanted to the left.  So you don't trust any other source at all--be it CNN, MSNBC, Routers, AP, the BBC, the New York Times, or anyone else.  So imagine for a second if your only source of information was a channel maintained by the government for just that purpose.  Imagine that you were told not to trust ANY other source of information.  Would you trust it?  So why would you think a  private organization with a clear profit motive would be any more honest?  Why would ANY source of news declare all other sources suspect?  Perhaps because they'd invalidate their bias?  Saying one source--maybe MSNBC--is heavily biased (a recent development, really) might be okay.  But all of them?

Imagine you knew a socialist.  You may, but you may not know it.  Or you may not.  Imagine asking him (or her) if they believe President Obama (or Nancy Pelosi, or Harry Reid) is one of them.  I will guarantee you that your most likely response is a snort of derision.  What you're being told is a "socialist agenda" is seen by those who actually are socialists as nothing of the sort.  Unless you think this is deliberate misdirection, it's pretty clear at this point that someone is embellishing the truth.  The agenda isn't remotely socialist.  It's barely even liberal.

Why do you think this so-called 'enthusiasm gap' exists?  Because many of us on the left feel betrayed by those we have elected to represent us.  You've been there.  You're there right now, as a matter of fact.  You're trying to replace those you don't feel represent you well enough.  That's a perfectly reasonable thing to do.  Except, honestly, you're walking into precisely the same "hope and change" trap we walked into.

How do I mean?  Well, imagine you've picked a couple of choice apples.  You've got them in your hand and you want to take them home.  But the only thing to carry them in is a barrel full of already rotten apples.  Do you think those nice crisp apples will refresh those in the barrel, or do you think the ones in the barrel will infect the shiny new ones?  Congress is like that.  You can send your best and brightest, those with all the idealism in the world, into the fray.  But here's something to remember.  Junior senators have no power.  They don't make policy.  They barely influence it.  So therefore, by the time they rise to the level of being able to do something about the mess, they've become part of it.  Why do you think we're all still fighting the same battles?  Some of them have been going on since the dawn of the Republic.

Ain't that a stinker?

What's worse is that, by replacing our people with your people, you risk handing power back to the same exact people who have betrayed you again and again and again.  Oh, sure, they say they're concerned about the same things you are, but when have they ever done anything to change it?  Did the last Republican Congress--teamed with a Republican President--do anything at all about the issues you consider the most important?  Did they balance the budget, create jobs, eliminate pork, return decision making ability to the states, or did they simply set the stage for the economic collapse we're experiencing now?  No, you can't blame the Democrats.  This mess belongs to all of them.  It's the responsibility of both parties, and neither seems to be able to see its way out of it.

The notion that simply leaving the tax cuts in place will somehow magically heal the wound is ludicrous.  They've been in place, and yet, things aren't getting any better.  The same things that motivate companies to off-shore the best jobs, leaving behind only low-level service jobs--haven't gone away.  And even if one buys into the idea that it's all the regulation and taxation--well, what kind of a working environment do you want, anyway?  Do you want to work in a place where they can put your life and limbs in jeopardy for a little higher profits, where if you are injured, there's no recourse but begging on the street?  That's what would happen without safety regulations and worker's compensation.  The people you'll be putting into power don't believe in limiting what corporations can do.  At all.  You'd have to strip yourselves to the level of Chinese slave labor to make it worthwhile for this organizations to bring those jobs back into the country.  And what will you have gained?

You don't have to accept any of this on faith.  I wouldn't expect you to.  But I implore you to ask yourselves--what if I'm even a little bit right?  What if the people you support don't have your best interests at heart?  What then?

And, by some chance, if you're one of those for whom it's really about the so-called 'culture wars,' who really wish this country to 'return to its Christian roots,' might I ask one question?  Which sect do you follow?  Anyone who's studied the history of Christianity knows it's a long history of breaks and schisms, often followed by bloody warfare.  Let's assume for a second that the religious wrested control of this nation from the secular.  Let's say you actually won this culture war.  How long would it be before your differences began to bleed through and infighting began?  It's easy when you have a common enemy--the atheists, pagans, and secularists.  But, defeated, they'd no longer be an issue.  Then your enemy would be your former ally.  And before you say it wouldn't happen, think again.  That's the way it works.  One group would gain ascendancy--let's say the Baptists--and the Catholics would resent it.  And start working against them.  So the Baptists would have to pass laws limiting the Catholics... and the Mormons, and the Lutherans, and who knows what other sects.  This is why the founding fathers created that (allegedly mythical) wall of separation in the first place.  Because nearly all the original colonies had their own church, and they knew that the most destructive force in Pre-Enlightenment Europe was religious infighting.  So they made it so no sect could gain power over another by keeping government separate from religion.  No sect could command the government, and the government could hold no power over any sect.

The individual beliefs of the founding fathers don't matter.  What matters is the reason why they thought this wall a necessity.  Violate it at your peril.

All I ask is that you consider my words.  I'm not lying to you.  Imagine, for a moment, that you believe that.  What then?  Where do we go from here?

God may not play dice with the universe, but we might want to start...

I've long said that I think the only long-term hope for human survival is to get off the planet--at least in part.  Not only can our hunger and our current economic system not be sustained on one world for long, but our inevitable waste--both toxic and relatively innocuous, must have a limit.  There must be a point when we refuse to refuse.

I believe space exploration and eventual colonization is our destiny as a species.  Not because some almighty deity declared it, but because we have all the tools to make it happen.  Sure, there are those who are skeptical, who think we should 'take care of things down here first,' or fear 'they'll just take our disease into space,' but I say to them that I, at least, am not so far gone that I thirst for the end of humanity.

I believe that there's something worth saving in us, despite our missteps.  I believe we are a clumsy, inept puppy of a species, just beginning to figure out how to toddle to the threshold leading out of our den and peering into the outer world.  And we are bold puppies, full of mischief and trouble.

I have little patience for those who would throw humanity on the discard pile, be it for religious reasons (hungering for a little Armageddon, are you?) or secular, philosophical reasons.  Despite our foolishness, despite our destructive tendencies toward our environment and our fellow creatures, we have within us the capacity to accomplish wondrous things if given the chance.  Those who feel as though we should turn away from that, slink back into our caves and forget the light we so briefly held within our hand, I have only one thing to say.

We're running out of options.

The debate over our rights and obligations regarding the fallout from our industrialization has waged for centuries, when we first began to venture away from a feudal economy into a capitalistic one.  People once thought even the river Thames was too large to be fouled by industry, but they found out quickly enough that the were wrong.

Now conservatives want to pretend that it's impossible than man's emissions are affecting our entire world, and the notion that it isn't seems so ludicrous that we find it hard to take them seriously.  We are poisoning the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the very Earth in which we grow our food.  And those who are making the most money from it will do nearly anything to keep us from impacting their profitability.

But we all know it's unsustainable.  There's no such thing as infinite growth in a finite system.  Something, somewhere, has to give.  And we can only hope that it's not our ecosystem.

There are those who have embraced the lifestyle of what I might call a neo-luddite, people that would like to reject the modern world and its vagaries.  But in the end the modern world will find you, and the very corporations you wish to ignore will happily shit in your pantry.  Witness what happened to the backwaters of Louisiana, as the oil from the gulf spill seeped slowly into their environs.

No one is safe, and it is not possible to hide from what's happening.  There is no going back, no forcing the genie back into the bottle.  Even assuming you could get every American on board with what you believe must be done, there are several billion people looking to live a Chinese version of the American Dream.  And a government and social structure that doesn't have our inherent checks and balances--regardless of how ineffective they may seem.

Honestly, it may be our only hope is to go forward, to strive with everything in us--our ingenuity, our ambition, our fear of calamity, to seek a solution to the problems we have caused.  Technology has put us here, but it's possible, just possible, that technology might also be the answer.

There are those who might scoff.  But let's remember how long we've been at this, and how many changes we've initiated already.  We stand on the brink of as many as a million world-changing discoveries and inventions, from protein farming to new sources of energy, from super-efficient batteries to nanotechnology.  We may not have the option of pulling back, reining in on our "carbon footprint" and environmental impact.  It may be too late for that.

Our best answer might well be "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead."  And this is not to say we shouldn't take into consideration possible negative consequences of some decisions... but we have to balance those with what we're likely to face if we do nothing.

Some might be able to argue that we should have exercised restraint, but I'm not sure that was in the cards.  This modern world, for all its problems, has either solved, or is on its way to solving, many of humanity's long-term problems.  Each leap forward carries all of us with it, whether we understand what it means or not.

Our only hope is to get "out there," to find and make use of the resources that we now know are abundant.  Our solar system awaits.  Let's stop fiddle-farting around and put our mind to not only repairing our mistakes, but transcending them.

I don't think we have a choice.

Is it a risk?  Yes, but is it a larger risk than sitting on our hands watching our planet come apart around us?  I don't think so.