A powerful line appeared in a Life magazine review of the Vietnam War, years after that nightmare concluded.
“Americans were at war with themselves,” it observed, “and both sides lost.”
Indeed, national accord had been ruptured.
No one wants to see that happen again, but that’s the kind of antagonism spreading across the land today, a bitter divide created not only by the merits of Obamacare, but by the bureaucratic heavy-handedness that jammed it down the throats of a populace whose questions had not been answered and whose fears had not been allayed.
It was Washington telling us, “Government knows best,” and if there’s anything we know for sure, regardless of which party holds office, it’s that government can screw up a two-car funeral.
That’s why, in his first inaugural address, Ronald Reagan drew thunderous applause in proclaiming, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
All these years later, thanks to a passionate civics teacher named Belle Strickland, this writer can quote such fundamental principles as, “Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Yet Barack Obama exhibits disdain for those he governs.
Accustomed to the hosannas of fawning admirers, he turns a deaf ear to anyone suggesting he might not have all the answers.
He simply declared his presidency demanded passage of this controversial legislation, and Congress assured him it would comply, by any means necessary.
Americans will always have contentious debate over volatile issues, but at the end of the day we have time-honored ways to reach a consensus, which is what this president and this Congress totally disrespected, igniting a furious backlash.
“Find out what people will submit to,” Frederick Douglass, the famed abolitionist, noted a century ago, “and you’ll have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.”
So millions of Americans are now telling Washington they do not want to submit to Obamacare, and he’s pooh-poohing their recalcitrance as civil disobedience.
It’s no such thing. It’s just a reminder this government still belongs to the people, which is what most of us were correctly taught a long, long time ago.
