Seems to Me . . . Too hot too quick

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By Stan Welch

See, here’s the problem with politics, at least in America. Not everyone agrees, but we all have the same rights.

Humph! So a person who believes that the government does nothing at all better than private business could do it, except for defending the nation, let’s say, has to deal with the fact that there is another person who thinks the government should build parks and libraries.

Now, that person who believes the least government is the best government has every right to that position. And in fact, I tend towards that belief myself. While I think the federal government has a larger legitimate role than just maintaining the armed forces, I think that role is much smaller than the role they fill now.

I don’t think the government should be so involved in our educational system, for example. But I understand how they got involved in it.

Southerners in the Fifties and Sixties still viewed Negroes as second class citizens, if they viewed them as citizens at all. So they kept those folks out of the white schools and the white stores and the white restaurants – and even the white cemeteries, where surely we are all equal. And they kept them in their own schools, which no matter what you may have heard, were separate, but hardly equal.

So eventually, when Southern states continued to refuse desegregation, the federal government and the DOJ stepped in and opened the schools by force. Oh, it may have been by force of law; but it was by force, nonetheless.

I think the Department of Justice has absolutely no reason to be passing judgment on the way we draw our districts in the South while letting northern and western states manage their own business. But I understand how it started.

White Southerners devised and implemented a number of schemes and tricks to keep those same Negroes they didn’t want to eat with from voting effectively by instituting poll taxes and literacy requirements, until the federal government and the DOJ decided that they would step in. That was almost a half century ago and they still haven’t stepped back out.

Those intrusions into states’ sovereignty began an explosion in the size of the federal government that hasn’t stopped yet. Now, in the twenty first century, the issue of government and its role is again before us. Never before has the federal government been bigger, eaten more, or intruded more deeply into our lives.

Apparently, a lot of people who feel differently, and who have every right to their position, think that government makes a pretty good caretaker. The fact that government can only give to them what it has taken from someone else doesn’t seem to either get through to them or bother them.

But we have one advantage that we have lacked before.

President Obama, with his extreme leftist approach, his ever bigger government agenda, has accelerated the process of dismantling many of the liberties that we hold dear to the point that people are waking up and waking up fast.

For decades those liberties have slowly eroded while the majority of people simply shrugged and grabbed the remote. The analogy is that if you put a frog in a pot of water and slowly heat it, he will stay there until he is cooked; but if you toss him into already hot water, he will fight to get out.

President Obama, with his nationalization of industries, his mandatory purchase of health care insurance, his menu of czars and his extraordinary use of public monies to rescue private businesses, his arrogance, and his record of failure, has gotten the water too hot too quickly, and the frogs are starting to feel the heat.

Seems to me, come next November, we all better hop down to the polls and vote.