Hennessy's View

The year that ends tonight didn’t begin a year a go tomorrow.  Nor does it have a number. 

I’m not sure when this year started or what to call it.  And, as surprising as it may sound, I don’t think I’ll miss it.

Call it the year of the tea party.  It lasted 22 months.

We accomplished only two things, really, in this massive human wave. 

1.  We reminded ourselves that we, the people, can still roar.

2.   We may have aborted the rebirth of international socialism.

Our work isn’t over, but at midnight we cross a threshold.  The Tea Party movement leaves childhood.  As an organization, we’re young adults. The world becomes less forgiving. 

Movements don’t think or decide. The folks who people them do.  If we try to continue the tactics and antics of this year, we’ll arrest our own development. 

If, however, we keep a narrow focus while maturing our methods and broadening our knowledge, we’ll continue to grow.

It’s been a long, very long, year.  But there’s ages left to go.

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This week last year, I read The 5000 Year Leap.  Good book.  If you haven’t read it, do so. You might learn some interesting things. 

But don’t expect The 5000 Year Leap to change you.  Or history. It won’t. 

Now, if 70 percent of the US population read it, it might make a difference.  Or maybe not. I tend to doubt it, but that’s fodder for a different post.

When tea partiers read books like Glenn Beck’s Common Sense or The 5000 Year Leap, we’re not broadening ourselves—we’re narrowing ourselves. We’re also committing Confirmation Bias: the tendency to search for information that confirms our existing beliefs while ignoring all evidence to the contrary.

In a study, psychologists were exposed to a short set of symptoms and asked to give a preliminary diagnosis.  Then, they were shown another set of symptoms for the same patients and asked to re-evaluate.  All of the psychologists stuck with their original diagnoses—only they increased their certainty of that original diagnosis. 

In other words, they believed that the additional information confirmed their original diagnoses.

The problems:

1.  The original list of symptoms were far too vague for a psychologist to confidently diagnose.

2. The second list contained information intended to contradict the original diagnosis in many cases.

Still, the trained, licensed PhDs saw in the second diagnoses only the information that confirmed their original guesses. 

When conservatives know only the information that supports their view, they tend to look like idiots when confronted with information beyond that narrow scope.  (Trust me—I’ve been the idiot.)

To avoid that embarrassing and destructive situation, learn outside of US political history.  In fact, you probably could go on a US political history diet for one year and still know more about the subject than any 100 liberals combined. 

In 2011, read some things beyond Glenn Beck’s reading list.  Here’s eight ideas to get you started:

The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

The 4-Hour Workweek, Expanded and Updated: Expanded and Updated, With Over 100 New Pages of Cutting-Edge Content.

Outliers: The Story of Success

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles

The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential…in Business and in Life

The Art of Non-Conformity: Set Your Own Rules, Live the Life You Want, and Change the World

Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us

While some of these books might touch on politics in places, they will introduce many to new ideas that are changing the world around us. 

The intention here is to broaden and build the movement, begin with ourselves.  If the idea of reading outside your comfort zone scares you, then you need to start today. 

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Politicians don’t seek money.  They seek power.  They use money to acquire power.  Once they have the power, money becomes irrelevant. 

Did you see how states behaved last summer? The “Race to the Top” is all you need to know about the relationship between government money, power, and degradation.

The Race to the Top education initiative dangled cash in front of states.  Most states, including Missouri, bit.  They competed against each other for the privilege of surrendering their sovereignty over education to a DoE overlord.

The fiasco reminded me of a submarine patrol.  We got underway a day early—before our Sea Store cigarettes arrived.  About half the crew smoked.  About ten percent brought their own brands, not available through Sea Stores at $3.00 a carton. 

Cigarettes became very valuable. Those with cigarettes sometimes degraded those who craved cigarettes.  I once saw my Chief Petty Officer perched on a chair barking like a dog for a Benson & Hedges 100. 

Secretaries of US Government departments like seeing the states beg and degrade themselves, too.  The states that demonstrated the most pathetic, degrading, obsequious groveling got the money.  Obama got their school districts.

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Yes, I read that.  And I saw that.  And somebody told me about that, too.

I see the ridiculous charges leveled by ignorant bigots against the Tea Party. I hear the slander on MSNBC and CNN.  I know that Ben Jealous and Nancy Pelosi live on lies about you and me the way vampires live on human blood.

I get it.

My immediate urge when I read or hear this nonsense is anger.  I want to sit down and tap out an angry, hurtful response.  And I did a lot of that for two years. 

Here’s what those conversations might look like to the 59 percent of voters who didn’t vote in 2010:

“Tea Partiers are racists!”

“No we’re not!”

“Yes you are.  and you’re divisive!”

“No we’re not.  You are!”

“No we’re not.  You are!”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. And you’re stupid.”

“I know you are, but what am I?”

Or we could do something else.

We could push an agenda of life, liberty, and (especially) the pursuit of happiness.

We could point out that we don’t hate the U.S. Government.  We just don’t trust the people who run it.  It doesn’t really matter who those people are. Temptation knows no rank.  We have given that government enough power and authority through legitimate means that sometimes people in government take even more power and authority through illegitimate means. 

And we could go further.  We could put forth positive ideas that improve people’s lives. For instance, we could replace the failed and corrupt Department of Education and the failed and corrupt school districts with small, community based schools that actually educate kids.

We could help struggling, unemployed people start their own businesses that will someday employ more people rather than borrowing money from China to pay our best people to sit idle.

Over the next year, we can develop specific policy proposals to make people freer, happier, and better off than they are now.  We can show the world how freedom and thrift and industriousness can solve the problems that vex America’s cities and towns. 

In the next year, we can commit to doing something else.  Instead of screaming back at the idiots and liars, we can pursue happiness for ourselves and our communities.  We can make federal programs obsolete.

To do this, though, we have to divert some of our energy and time away from arguing with the idiots. We have let the people see who’s lying and who’s telling the truth.

Christ said that they will know us by our love. 

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This is my opinion, and it’s not all about politics.  Nor are they necessarily in any particular order.  Save for one.  (You’ll see.)

• Nancy Pelosi, Phil Hare, and other Democrats admit their contempt for the US Constitution.
• Barack Obama continues bowing to tin-horn dictators . . . who really are his superiors.
• Rep. Russ Carnahan funnels millions of tax dollars to his family business.
• The business world discovers “gamification,” an idea that will turn marketing upside in 2011.
• Europe suffers third consecutive frigid winter.
• Republicans gain 63 House seats to take it back after only two terms in the minority.
• Republicans gain six seats in the US Senate, placing that body within easy striking distance for 2012.
• Barack Obama’s popularity hovers at 40 percent, the traditional “point of no return.”
• Wikileaks embarrasses the White House and endangers intelligence operatives’ lives. But Obama only reacts because of the embarrassment.
• The Tea Party becomes a long-term movement that continues to disrupt and surprise.

That’s the top ten list.  But the top story is not here. 

The top story of 2010: Republicans gain more than 600 state legislature seats. 

Why is that important? Because those new legislatures give the GOP a conservative bench to dominate national and state policy for generations.

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