Electric Cart Obesity

Via-Jer's Notes

It is not unusual to go into a store today and see someone on a electric cart, either one provided by the store or their own. Sometime the person is an elderly person who, for one reason or an another has difficulty getting around. When I see this I think how wonderful it is that we have the technology to help the elderly, infirm or handicapped to partake in every day life instead of being confined to their home.

However on other occasions, more than I care to admit, the person riding in the cart is extremely overweight usually obese and my thoughts are not quite so kind. Although I know that in some cases the weight of the individual may be the result of some other medical condition, I also know that often times the persons obesity is the result of their individual choices and thus my lack of "empathy" less alone sympathy. Sometimes I just want to say "Hey if you would just get out of the damned cart and walk a little bit more you might not need the cart," But that would not be very politically correct I'm sure.

I find this electric cart obesity phenomena so prevalent in American society today to be a good analogy of our federal government. The government has grown so obese that it is incapable of self locomotion. Like some slothful self indulgent sow that can do little more than roll around in it's own excrement and mud, our government sits in DC and consumes every morsel of productive endeavor created by the rest of the nation.

Totally incapable of generating any truly productive function because of an ever more disengaged from reality bureaucratic labyrinth, the Federal Government simply creates ever more bizarre functions in order to feed itself.  Rather than  follow the simple dictates of their oaths of office which is to uphold the Constitution, Legislators legislate laws that they do not read or understand, Administrators enact rules and regulations which burden everyone but themselves and Judges engineer society in keeping with their elitist view of how things should be, All of this done to perpetuate their own self indulgent need to justify and expand their very existence  and power.

As Gibbons wrote of the fall of the Roman Empire "Prosperity ripened the principle of decay." so too has America's richness decayed the core of our republican form of governance. Not content to govern over our nation's prosperity, the federal government has become a mechanism to enrich and empower those least responsible for that prosperity, the political class. America is devolving into a Hunger Game nation where the "masses" live to enrich and empower the elites for their own amusement.

The political class which goes far beyond the elected officials but includes a vast  bureaucracy, lobbyist, cronies and even an entrenched media complex is so obsessed with maintaining and growing their influence that they do not even see their own obese behavior. They live within their own bubble of disregard and disinterest for the rest of the nation. A political class which looks at the vast citizenship of the nation as poor creatures to either be pitied or feared but certainly not to be respected. If they truly respected those that they governed/ruled they would not continue to bite the hand that feeds them.

And it is we who feed them and still it is not enough to sustain their insatiable appetite. Not content with devouring this generations prosperity they have begun and are well on the way to consuming our children's and grandchildren's prosperity. Not capable of self restraint they borrow even from our global adversaries and print money until it becomes ever more worthless and still they want more while simultaneously claiming that they are doing it for us. Rather they are doing it to us and  they are too self absorbed to even recognize this.

The government in DC has become the single biggest entity in the lives of Americans. Pushing aside community organizations, manipulating and controlling state and local governments, crowding out family, and seeking even to replace our individual relationships with God and yet they still are not content. Like some demented obsessed villain in some grade B movie who slobbers from the mouth as his hands clutch at the air, the Federal Government and its many faceted enablers, stomp through the streets and back roads of America crying out "more I need more!" 

Hyperbole? Only if you do not remember or have never know what America used to be and what it was meant to be.  Is it too late to change directions? I do not know, perhaps it is. But one thing I do know, at some point the battery on the cart is going to die and there will be no one that can recharge it.  At which point  fat lady liberty will either have to get up and walk, or the rest of the world will walk right around her in disgust.