Ruled by Children

By Alan Caruba

One of my favorite lines from the New Testament appears in Corinthians II, Chapter 13, verse 11: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, but when I became a man, I put aside childish things.”

It is hard to shake the notion that Americans have voted a lot of children to serve in Congress and the greatest child of all, Barack Obama, to be our president. Who else but children would continue to enact new programs that “entitle” Americans to receive all manner of services for which there is no money?

It didn’t start with this administration or Congress, but it strikes me that “the Party of No”, Republicans, has been the only one to demonstrate what it means to be an adult these days. It’s called learning from experience and, in the past, they have been no less guilty of this behavior than Democrats.

Naturally, everyone will look for someone or something else to blame for the nation’s financial crisis—-and it is a crisis—-but it is the person in the mirror who is to blame. Perhaps because I am the son of a Certified Public Account and a mother who got into the workplace early in life, I had it drummed into me to not spend beyond my means and to pay my bills as they came in.

My parents had married in 1928 just prior to the Great Depression, had two children during the course of it, and moved from Newark, NJ to the suburbs during World War Two. They paid off their home mortgage before they retired. Along the way, they put my older brother and I through college, owned cars, voted, and participated in the life of their community.

In short, they lived mature, responsible lives. If they could not afford something, they did without or they waited until they could. This is hardly a remarkable story, but compare it now to a society in which every other television commercial is by companies that offer to help you deal with the Internal Revenue Service or to reduce your credit card debt because you’re in over your head.

We live in a credit society, a debtor society and the biggest debtor of all is the United States of America. Those sent to Washington, D.C. to manage the affairs of the nation have utterly failed.

The Obama administration's “answer” to the nation's fiscal crisis is a commission to address the problem of debt. A commission! And one established by executive order because the Senate rejected the idea!

Writing in U.S. News & World Report, Mortimer B. Zuckerman, its Editor-in-Chief, pointed out recently that “Our cumulative national debt is estimated to climb as high as 140 percent of GDP by 2030, up from 50 percent just a few years ago.”

“If we fail to act in response to these deficits, we face the dangers of a collapsed dollar; of foreigners who may stop buying treasury bills; of soaring interest rates that will constrain our economy and require 7 percent of our entire economic output to be paid as interest to debt holders; and of a decline in public services.”

The notion that, in the face of this reality, the Democrat-controlled Congress would create an expanded Medicare entitlement, adding millions to its rolls while slashing a half trillion from its funds (taking over one sixth of the nation’s economy) is so astonishingly stupid it defies belief.

This is what happens when children are in charge and some 330 million Americans are about to discover what it is like to live in a third world nation. The 12 to 20 million illegal aliens in our midst already know what that is like. It is the reason they came here.

It’s not like Americans don’t know how serious the problem is. They showed up at town hall meetings last summer. They showed up in the hundreds of thousands in Washington, D.C. last September. Thousands attended a huge Tea Party rally in Searchlight, Nevada last month.

The problem is that children are in charge in Congress. The problem is also that a child, abandoned by his birth father, then by his step-father, and finally by his mother, is president.

I am all for representative democracy in the conduct of our republic, but like millions of Americans I am baffled by our inability to have any impact whatever on those currently holding political power in Congress; the Democrats. It is cold comfort that we must wait until November 2, 2010 to rid ourselves of them.

Published originally in 1954, the now classic novel, “Lord of the Flies” spelled out what happens when a group of British schoolboys are shipwrecked on an island. It is a portrait of cruelty and lawlessness until they are rescued by adults. There is nobody left to rescue America except its adults.

© Alan Caruba, 2010