A DEBACLE

The Democrats and the mainstream media are enthusiastically embracing the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) folks, comparing them favorably to those hated “Tea Partiers.” That’s ludicrous. The Tea Party was (and still is) totally focused on repealing ObamaCare and pushing back against President Obama’s Czar-filled big government agenda. In the summer of 2010, Tea Partiers gathered hundreds of thousands strong on the National Mall, made patriotic speeches, sang songs, and uttered a few prayers. They then picked up all the trash, went home and voted both Republicans and Democrats out of office, replacing them with people they felt better understood the need for a more limited, fiscally responsible government.

Number of Tea Partier’s arrested:  zero.

In an article in The American Thinker (10/17/2011), J.R. Dunn notes that a better comparison to these undisciplined, group-chanting, OWS folks is the radical rebel crowd who stormed the 1968 Democrat convention in Chicago and got their heads bloodied in the process. Dunn notes that in 1968, the Democrats were totally in charge of the government as had mostly been since the days of FDR. Liberalism was the establishment that the 1960s kids were protesting against.

For years liberals had been trying to co-opt the youth revolt for their own purposes. Lyndon Johnson promised them cradle-to-grave welfare through The Great Society programs. But Johnson also gave them the Vietnam War, and that was a bridge too far.  In November 1968, the voters took the full measure of both the radical protestors and their erstwhile Democrat allies and gave Richard Nixon a huge victory over Hubert Humphrey. The Democrat Party has never fully recovered from that 1968 debacle.

Now we have Democrat politicians and unions embracing the OWS protests while practicing “crony capitalism” with Wall Street. How will that end for Democrats?

Jim Littlejohn

Concerned Coastal Voters

Gualala, CA

STRIKING OUT ON TAXES

Not born with a silver spoon athletically, the only opening for me was traditional:  Practice and hope for improvement.  There was no immediate gratification; throughout 4th grade I was still in the top 5% on striking out.  Occasionally, my father came home from work in time to throw strikes for me to swing at.  I was an intentional spastic: The harder I tried the worse I got.

What I learned was that the pleasure from trying increased faster than the skill.     I acquired confidence that I could have fun. Then the baseball started taking off on its own. If the rules had been changed to protect me from a period of unhappiness, natural athletes(4th grader’s dream)  would have lost confidence and I would have not learned a lessons that boosted mine. 

What is really lost when a society grows small and takes from the gifted fair credit for their home runs ?  Confidence.  Confidence in order, predictability, and fairness of the system encourages the gifted to excel and the rest of us to aspire and develop.

Handicaps may work in golf because you’re playing against the course.  Do handicaps work in life?  If government gave half the citizens a charitable handicap by requiring only the most productive to pay taxes would that undermine confidence or deter motivation?

Societies grow small when confidence declines. Governments cannot create level playing fields by making gifted play up hill and giving less gifted a down-hill run without undermining confidence. Without confidence no one invests and positive forms of deferred gratification (planning, practicing, and perfecting) decline.

After the 4th grade don’t throw a kid floaters or you’ll undermine his respect. Never, vote for a politician that promises to change rules to distribute handicaps.

David Griffith

Concerned Costal Voter

The Sea Ranch,CA

NO ALTERNATIVE

Now that I write letters to the ICO, my “otherness” apparently kindles a desire among some of my liberal friends to convert me to the rightness of their position. This is nothing new, but their arguments have become a bit more subtle, and to quote the Bard, “too clever by half.” Recently at a wonderful dinner, a person of the Left looked at me with evangelical fervor and said something like, “We’re too divided as a country. We should just get along and not be writing divisive things.” 

Not seeing any other “letter writers” at the table, I responded to the concerned Liberal that our government was designed to allow differing views. The framers of our Constitution specifically sought to ensure that all sides would be heard. The response was, essentially, “But we can’t get anything done. We can’t get our problems solved.” 

“But that’s what elections are for,” I said, “that’s how we settle things in this country.” To my great dismay I heard, “But elections aren’t working. We need to do something else.”

“Okay,” I said with my usual control (i.e., no spittle was spewing from my mouth), “what would you recommend - - a dictatorship, Communism, Socialism?” I got no response, but the “elections aren’t working” phrase stuck with me. I’ve recently read several dreamy paeans from the Left  extolling the “efficiency” of the Chinese. Even President Obama stated (jokingly, I hope) that if we followed China’s system, he could quickly solve our problems. Are some on the Left advocating silencing dissent to “get things done?”

Certainly elections don’t always work for your positions or your Party, but what’s the alternative? The answer is there’s nothing outside our democratic system that is worth considering. And if people don’t know that at this point in history, then God help us all.

Jim Littlejohn

Concerned Coastal Voters

Gualala, CA