Critical Mass

It would actually have been a better pun before the election when some of us viewed the outcome as critical to the survival of the republic. Now that Scott Brown is the winner, the Senate election in Massachusetts is not the critical juncture anymore, but the situation is still approaching crisis.

For all the denial of Obama Administration officials and supporters that Senator Brown's victory was in any way a referendum on anything but local politics in the state of Massachusetts, or at worst, a protest vote against the failure of the party in power to accomplish their stated objectives, polling among Brown supporters indicates exactly the message that voters were making a statement to the federal government that they are opposed to the health care reform bill, and more particularly to the tactics being used by the current administration and Congress to push it and other changes through.

The merits of that or any other bit of legislation are no longer important or even worth consideration. The methods of our Congress are so similar to the behavior of the Parliament of Great Britain toward the American colonies that it is unthinkable that revolution of some sort will not take place unless we are not the same sort of people that inhabited this continent in the 1770's. How fitting it is that the first shots in this revolution were fired in the same state as the one that led to the formation of this republic.

One could go back to the fall victories in Virginia and New Jersey and point to them as indicators of the direction of the electorate away from the policies of the Progressives, but it wasn't until the shock of Massachusetts that the will of the people was felt as strongly as the stand of the Minutemen on Lexington Green that resulted in the "shot heard 'round the world."

The comparison is not overly dramatic. The repercussions are likely to be every bit as transformative as those of the American Revolution, particularly if the powers in D.C. react in the same manner to this uprising as the Crown did following Lexington/Concord; not in the sense of an armed put-down, but rather in failing to recognize that the majority of the populace are not content to be meek subjects to their wills- accepting the supposedly benevolent dictates of the Great Fathers in Washington without the checks and balances that the Founders built into the Constitution for this very purpose.

Just as the colonists evolved an awareness that foreign rule was no longer in their best interest, the people of the today's United States are slowly waking up to the recognition that a bloated government serves its own ends first and has become an entity unto itself- separate and alien from the common American and viewing us as indifferently as the Lords of Parliament across a gulf wider than the Atlantic Ocean.

We've had our tea parties and exchanged political salvoes. Right now, the Progressive leaders are holed up in Washington like the redcoats in Boston pondering their next moves, while militia arrive daily to oppose them. They'd better pay attention to the sounds of axes and shovels on "Bunker Hill" as they consider their own critical decisions. To paraphrase Rahm Emmanuel, crisis can sometimes be a useful thing.