Playing With Fire
By Adam Graham (04/10/06)
Fire is vital to the maintenance of life on Earth. Yet, fire can be dangerous when not properly controlled. As any camper will tell you, attempts to start a fire without the necessary ingredients is often useless.
Anger, like fire is an important part of our political process. Anger motivates people to seek justice, right wrongs, and correct problems. With no anger, our politics would be left in stagnation. We would be indifferent to injustice and we'd still have things like slavery. Anger's not a bad starting point.
However, in politics anger alone can be a destructive force, when not balanced by a positive vision or not balanced by specific action to address the actual problem. Such as has been the case in the outrage over the immigration debate.
We find a lot of people upset over what Congress has tried to do about immigration but we've been short on constructive solutions. Some have given the solution of merely taking their ball and going home, refusing to vote to punish the Republicans as if increasing the number of Democrats will solve the underlying problem of illegal immigration.
Conservatives face a challenge in the 21st Century. We have thousands of Conservative leaders with different philosophies and no clue on how they're going to term their long-term goals into reality. We're like a football team with thousands of quarterbacks, each playing without a game plan throwing footballs in random directions and hoping for a touchdown.
Until then, the Conservative movement is at risk of following the Liberals into a fog of negativism. The greatest question that must be asked about governmental failures and problems is, "What are we going to do about it?" When that question predominates the Conservative movement, then we can become a constructive force for change rather than a nest of undirected anger and rage.
(Printer friendly version) Email: Adam Graham
