A Lesson Unlearned

The President spoke to calm the citizenry recently:

Sorry, did I say “calm the citizenry”? I meant to “rile those subjects receiving alms from his most beneficent largesse”.

It would be a good exercise in imagination for those who receive these giveaways to think about what they would do if those benefits actually stopped. And I don’t mean “stopped” in the sense of “went on furlough for a couple weeks or months, only to come back with additional sugar to make up the shortfall.” I mean, what if the Tea Party people are right and this rate of expenditure is unsustainable and eventually the huckster’s constant motion machine falls to a pile of gears and pistons. Then what will they do? Get some sort of job even with their chronic back pain? Perhaps pick up some craft they can barter? Attend a church that can help out? Maybe cultivate some family relationships and bear some children so they have someone to take care of them in their old age?

The rhetoricians–and I apologize to Cicero for calling them that–on one side of the debate seem to want to carve different channels for imaginations to run. Instead of self-reliance, some leaders preach that while some citizens don’t have it, someone (“the rich”) does have it, and someone must take it from the haves and give it to them. It’s a Mad Max mentality where the government is The Humungus, liberating gasoline for its followers. We don’t need deserts, leather, and collanders. We might already be there.

(Video conveniently seen on Real Debate Wisconsin as I was thinking about this post.)

UPDATE: Thanks for the link, Tam. Hey, VFTP readers, you can get the trade paperback version of my novel John Donnelly’s Gold, which Roberta X. mentions here, for 20% off today (Friday, July 15, 2011) by entering the secret code BIG305 at checkout.

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