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Cleveland
Plain Dealer...
Lessons from a wet
basement: Kevin O’Brien
By Kevin OBrien, The Plain Dealer
Thursday, March 10, 2011, 5:25 AM
I will not claim to know how John Boehner feels.
The speaker of the House has a nasty political problem on his hands,
and solving it may just take more distasteful and politically unhealthy
work than he’s willing to do -- even with the help of a Tea
Party-influenced freshman class that hasn’t had time to “go native” in
Washington yet.
So I will suggest that what I know is how some successor of his will
feel -- probably not all that many years from now -- when the time for
finger-crossing, blame-placing, campaign-promising, horse-trading,
wishing, hoping and ignoring has run out and we actually have to clean
up the mess we’re in.
I speak from hard experience.
The last two “trash days” in our neighborhood have seen Everests of
once-treasured possessions piled curbside. No one had a bigger pile
than ours.
Cleaning out the basement was a chore I would happily have avoided
forever. I envisioned my heirs sorting through it all, decades from
now, grateful for the “time capsule” Dad left them.
There were all kinds of things down there that no one used anymore. But
we’d paid good money for them at some point, and they weren’t really in
the way, so there seemed no reason to get serious about getting them
out of there. I saw no need to invest a lot of sweat in getting rid of
such carefully boxed and stowed . . . whatever it was.
Then the waters rose and my attitude changed.
It’s amazing how quickly an item’s sentimental value decreases once
it’s taken a bath in 7 inches of backed-up sewage. Suddenly, even
irreplaceable mementos get nothing more than a cursory last look, a
shrug and the old heave-ho.
Sentiment drains away from every decision about what to salvage and
what to junk, and the focus narrows to getting an exhausting job done.
So from my house to yours, Mr. Boehner, a word of advice.
The waters have been rising in the federal government’s basement for
decades now -- and faster in the last couple of years than ever before.
If we had just gotten rid of things as we realized we didn’t need them,
the task of wrestling them to the curb wouldn’t be as daunting as it
will be when we finally get around to it. Even now, if we’d at least
start making a serious dent in the junk, the work wouldn’t be quite so
hard later.
But the federal government is the world’s worst pack rat. Worse yet,
someone is still “using” just about everything that’s down there.
There’s a political payoff associated with every item, from an F-16 to
a crop subsidy. And every program, office and agency that employs a
federal worker is transferring wealth from taxpayers to
government-sponsored interests that range from global corporations to
illegal aliens.
Anything hauled to the curb is going to cause someone, somewhere some
kind of pain. Witness the caterwauling over the necessary scrapping of
unsustainable government employee benefits in Ohio and Wisconsin.
There’s more of that to come. Much more. More cuts, more predictions of
catastrophe, more threats of political revenge. But the water is up to
the $14 trillion mark. Members of Congress need to put on their scuba
gear and get to work.
None of us will like all of what results, but it cannot happen soon
enough. We need to get past the dipping-a-toe-in-the-water stage.
A word on Westboro The Supreme Court majority got it right. When the
Westboro Baptist Church takes its reprehensible road show to the
funeral of someone who died defending, among other things, the First
Amendment, its intentionally hurtful speech is protected by that same
First Amendment.
But the court is not saying the rest of us have to take Westboro’s act
lying down. It’s just saying that putting Westboro in its place isn’t a
government job.
Westboro’s right is to speak, not to disrupt funerals or to cause pain.
Our right is to confound Westboro through our own freedoms of speech
and assembly, as the people of Weston, Mo., did very successfully last
November.
Professional victims already are too eager to brand every critical
utterance “hate speech.” The court did well not to take us any farther
down that road.
Read it at The Cleveland Plain Dealer
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