GOVERNMENT: The enemy within

Listening to Mike Crapo talk about how much fun he is having finally “standing up to government” is all part of the wacky world we have created in Washington. It has been a joint project.

This is good stuff Mike. We’d all like to see you and Raul and Jim stand up to that mirror and punch it to pieces. Let us know when your fists reach your own faces… of course THAT will never happen, because people who are in government never think that THEIR involvement in government is the problem in government. It’s always someone else, somewhere else.

News flash boys — you are in government and you’ve been in there for some time now (24 years for Crapo counting the Idaho Legislature). The privileges you have enjoyed and the fight you have made are as right- or as wrong-headed as the mirror. We have met the enemy and he is us.

What has happened in America is this: Marketing has become more important than the truth. This is inevitable in a land where we have gradually subjugated all values to one value: “getting to the money.” The religion many of us claim to follow informed us long ago that the love of money is the root of all evil. We were also reminded that a man cannot serve two masters.

Successful marketing too often means peddling lies for truth, being less than genuine about one’s agenda and intent: Getting other people to do the real work while you convince yourself, and them, you are doing the “real work.” And if marketing gets you to the money and power, and the truth does not, we have demonstrated again and again that too often we will choose marketing.

We choose it to our long-term detriment.

The Founders sought to create a governance model that would spread and balance power. If money is power and you want to spread the power then you have to spread the money. We have gone, and are continuing to move, in the opposite direction.

The concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a few is what our ancestors fought AGAINST! Are we prepared to be the instruments of this kind of reversal? Can we handle the irony? As we look at “government” do we even realize the extent to which we are looking into a mirror?

The “it” has always been us.

STEPHEN D. BRUNO

Hayden Lake