The Solipsistic Tea Party

The Tea Party movement seems extraordinarily self-centered, selfish, self-interested and self-absorbed. Such an attitude could ruin everything we have thought of as America!
by Charlie Leck

My word of the day came through from Dictionary.com this morning – solipsism – and I found it interesting. It kept coming back to me as I sat back to read through the New York Times and then the Washington Post. The Tea Party movement would destroy Medicare and Medicaid and bring an eventual end to Social Security.

Word of the Day for Monday, October 14, 2013

solipsism \ SOL-ip-siz-uhm\, noun
   1. Philosophy. The theory that only the self exists, or can be proved to exist.
   2. Extreme preoccupation with and indulgence of one’s feelings, desires, etc.;
       egoistic self-absorption

America has been great and unique because it has cared!
There is no doubt that America has been a unique nation among the nations of earth. Over the years, others have followed America’s shining example. Now, many of those nations watch in wonder as the Tea Party tries to reshape America into something far different than the words engraved in the interior of Lady Liberty.

“Give me your tired, your poor,
your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

The quotation was taken from an 1883 poem by Emma Lazarus (The New Colossus).

France presented the remarkable statue to us as a gift. It was a response to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. The French had been inspired by Lincoln’s courage and his tenacity and his utter belief that all men should be free and a part of the great dream that is America.

But now, the new far-right conservatives in America wish to attack the entitlement programs. Rather than viewing those who are not full participants in America’s wealth as “tempest-tossed,” they see them as dead-beats. What the Tea Party wants for America is frightening and revolutionary!

I have always felt it is the duty of the fortunate to help those who are less so. Now, the Tea Party members are rightfully going to cry out about those who are “dead beats” and “criminal” who are getting “helped” by the system. That complaint is justified, but it is one thing to arrange the system so that such people are cut out and quite another thing to cut out everyone because of those types.

America is unique! Long may it be such!

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