“If you are receiving government payments in any of its redistributive forms, then you have no business going to one of these events (Tea-Parties). Food stamps, student loans, subsidized housing, public schooling, and so on — your time would be better spent just staying home and trying to figure out how to disconnect the oxygen hose yourself. Refuse the benefits first.”
Doug Wilson
This is why the tea parties, while stirring, won’t accomplish much. We already are past the entitlement tipping point. How many social security recipients were out 15 April? How many school teachers were out 15 April? After all, Government schools are the biggest works programs this nation has. Do protesting school teachers really desire to reduce the size of Government? How many veterans were out 15 April? Do veterans really desire to reduce the size of Government?
Obviously, this is not to say that some ways that Government spends money are legitimate and as such some employees who receive government money are legitimate. All of this is only to suggest that as a nation we are already compromised. To many piglets trying to get to the teats to really want to kill the sow.
Mind you, I don’t fault all the piglets for trying to get the milk of government largess anymore then I would fault a crack baby for desiring the drug it was hooked on quite apart from his or her choice. Many people are government dependent quite apart from their choice. One has to only think of not only children eating off of groceries coming from food stamps, but also one needs to remember the cottage industries that grow up around Government largess. Think of all the copying machines and office supplies that private businesses sell to public schools and government offices. Government money and dependence on government largess in the private sector is ubiquitous. Trying to pull apart the culture of government benefits from the US citizenry and the private sector would be like trying to pull juicy chewing gum out of stringy hair.
The Church struggles with providing a solution to all this. Ideally, we would try to care for our own, but since the individuals in Churches are already taxed at such a high rate, it is difficult to expect members to give enough, beyond a tithe, so that the Church can care for her own. It is expecting a great deal of people to finance, through their taxes, the States irresponsible social services while at the same time finance, through their offerings, the Churches responsible social services. One can only spread butter so thinly over humongous portions of bread.
We have created a entitlement culture, replete with all the cottage industries that spring up around any major job and benefits supplier. We have forced many people to either suck at the teat of the Government sow or die. (If you doubt this imagine what would happen to elderly people who refused to take the government benefits associated with prescription drug use.) If and when the State nationalizes health care there won’t be anybody left who won’t getting milk from the Wet Nurse State. Because of this there are no easy answers in how to extricate ourselves from this tar baby entitlement culture we’re stuck on and with. Because of this our Freedom as a people is completely compromised. None of us are really free.
To be honest it is our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents who should have been out Tea(ing), but many of them were to busy voting for Johnson’s Great Society or Roosevelt’s New Deal or Teddy Roosevelt’s square deal. The, so called, “greatest generation” failed us miserably on this score. It was these generations that laced our tea with arsenic and now we have naught to do but bravely drink it down.
Of course, none of this means we shouldn’t fight to the very end. But we must fight with eyes wide open. We are a defeated people and culture in the twilight of our eclipse. The best we can hope for is to make some kind of glorious last stand that some minstrel might capture in song, and that might be remembered by generations yet to come, who, remembering our final effort, might use it to inspire future generations to build Christ honoring culture.
Some will suggest that this is overly pessimistic. I will be accused of having lost my postmillennialism. However, postmillennialism should not require us to be Pollyanna about reality. One can be a postmillenialist and at the same time believe that the West will fail. There is nothing about the West that guarantees that God won’t continue to bring the judgment we deserve.