A point of agreement between left and right

If you locked me in a room with a Tea Partier and forced us to debate politics, there would be very, very little common ground, except, I believe, on one important point: I think we would both agree that the American people have lost control of their government. Now the paths taken to reach this conclusion will vary greatly, but the end point is the same. The U.S. government no longer works for the people, but answers only to the military/industrial/media elite.

They allow us to go through the sham of elections every couple of years, but it really doesn’t matter if we vote for George Bush or Barack Obama, men who outwardly anyway, have very different political philosophies, because the real drivers of our government are controlling it from behind the scenes, like drone pilots thousands of miles away from their target. They sit in offices in the Pentagon and at Goldman Sachs and GE and Koch and the NSA rewarding those politicians who do their bidding and punishing those who oppose them. For the most part, the person who warms the chair in the Oval Office matters little.

Many people who can’t clearly articulate exactly what is wrong with our government have nonetheless made their disgust known by not voting, not participating and basically not giving a shit about who is in office. And that’s okay with the powers behind the scenes. The fewer people who participate means it is less likely their plans will be thwarted by the common rabble.

What to do? Ron Paul gave a speech this past week that all but called for armed revolution. Others on the far right have suggested as much. On the left, there have been similar, yet more timid, allusions to the need for a people’s uprising. My belief is that there won’t be any significant large-scale protests unless the economy truly tanks. Too many people are still too well off financially to be angry enough to take to the streets. If the economy goes south, however, and unemployment rises dramatically, only then will we see a significant citizen’s uprising.

The irony, of course, is that the day might come when Tea Party conservatives and socialist Lefty’s are marching shoulder to shoulder in the streets of America.