Fundamental Stupidity

Remember when Barack Obama said we were “five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America”?  The reaction of the crowd was appalling. People cheered. Why cheer the idea of fundamentally transforming the country which provides its citizens more freedom, more opportunity – socially, economically, politically – and more liberty than any other country in the entire history of the planet?  Why would the people cheer the transformation of a government that acknowledges its citizens have certain inalienable rights that it is bound to protect?

Let’s be clear. Even the best country has its faults. Even in the best of countries people fall on hard times. Even in the land of opportunity some people can’t catch a break. Tragedy is ubiquitous to being human. There is no system in the world that has eliminated human suffering, although many socialistic and communistic regimes claim this to be their end.  I’m not saying that the United States is perfect. It too can be improved. But there is a chasm as wide as the Grand Canyon in the difference between fundamental transformation and making improvement.

To fundamentally transform something is to say, “I don’t like the way it performs, functions, or acts.”   It is to address the forming or serving essential components of a system or structure.  Painting the living room may make the room brighter or update it with the latest trendy color, but it is not a fundamental transformation until a wall or two has been knocked down, a ceiling vaulted and the 22 year old Lay-Z Boy with the nappy fabric and broken spring has been hauled to the curb.  

The fundamental components of the United States lie in the principles of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.  To fundamentally transform America is to attack our founding principles and values: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.  It has been these two documents that have established the systems, opportunities and freedoms that have made America great, its economic engine prosper and protected each citizen’s natural right.

Why then would you cheer the transformation of a system that protects what is naturally yours?  For no other reason than it feels good to think you are suddenly morally superior to all other who don’t want to transform America.

We have seen the vast expansion of government morph into bureaucracies that has no boundaries, no limits, no accountable to any other branch of government. These bureaucracies are law maker, executor and judge over their domains.  We’ve seen the national debt grow to unfathomable numbers that can be neither justified nor sustained. And all we want to do is continue the same course of spending on programs that cripple the ambition of the nation’s citizen. We have seen a shift in values that have moved us from liberty to emphasizing material equality.  We’ve seen the individual attacked and the state elevated.   We’ve seen the focus placed on what feels good rather than what is honestly best for the whole. And as we have watched the socialistic European model fail, we have shifted more and more to the following that same path of destruction.

Why are we headed in a fundamentally different direction than our Founding Fathers intended? To say that the cheering crowds surrounding Obama were selfish would be kind as would be to call them ignorant.  Stupid is more appropriate. We have grown dumb and dumber neglecting our responsibility to know what our government is, why it was formed the way it was and what our responsibilities and obligations in self-government are.  It’s no accident that we were given a gift like no other in the course of history. We have failed to protect our inheritance by not educating ourselves about the very creature that we are now allowing to enslave us.  

If you are still following the "fundamentally transform" mantra maybe it is time you stepped away from the Kool-Aid and hit a text book or two.