Confession Of A Reluctant Tea-Partier

by Luba Sindler - June 15th, 2011 - The American Thinker

My husband and I applied for US citizenship the day we became eligible. I think my examining officer got the shock of his life when during the interview I recited the Bill of Rights, named all Supreme Court justices and added the names of all elected officials of the state including our hapless congressman. Talk about useless knowledge! After that we proudly voted in every election, but the idea of venturing a political opinion never crossed my mind (an unfortunate result of being brought up in a totalitarian society where keeping your mouth shut is a basic rule of survival). There was something unseemly in proclaiming my deep love and appreciation of America for all to hear.

When candidate Obama showed up, I realized that I had heard his typical stump speech every single day of my old Soviet life from big and small Communist party bosses -- the same structure, the same cadences, the same bogeymen, the same demagoguery, the same targets. The American people had no defense against this rhetoric. The result of the elections was totally predictable. To me it was a "Back to the Future" moment.

I struggle with the right definition to describe how willing most Americans are to throw away our freedoms while those from foreign states that know true tyranny are dying (literally) to come here. Is irony the right word?

How is it that those who have never known anything but freedom can become so frustrated with the trivial flaws of our nation. They seek to embrace the clearly evil flaws of socialist utopia as if the evidence of its horrors are not documented repeatedly in the annals of history. They cannot grasp what they are going to lose in their greedy reach for their hypothetical dream world - based on a totalitarian government that will fix all ills. How can anyone be that gullible?