In the years to come, as President Ronald Reagan was known as “The Great Communicator,” will Barack Obama become known as “The Great Divider?” It is a crucial question for Barack Obama and his place in history. However, there is another related question – a question that is perhaps even more important and fundamental that Americans are now asking themselves. Does the U.S. Constitution still mean anything? In the wake of the passage of Obama’s healthcare reform – a bill so unpopular that Congress had to resort to a budgetary ruse called “reconciliation” to bypass normal Constitutional requirements – it is a natural concern.

To answer that question, there is no need to ask the pundits, the poll takers, the Ivy League scholars or elite New York sophisticates. Stay still for a moment and listen. Open your eyes and watch. See and hear what is taking place around you: everyday Americans standing up to a government that is attempting to dismantle the very ideals and governing principles put in place by our Founding Fathers. Ideals immortalized in the U.S. Constitution. A Pledge of Allegiance said by school children at the start of each day. Dreams reflected in patriotic songs and heart-warmed tributes to the things we hold most dear.

“O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain…”

Yet the sharp divisions that are forming in cities and towns throughout America are not ones of hate – something the mainstream media’s pre-determined storyline is quick to suggest. The anger and frustration voiced by the thousands of people banding together is not based on race or color of creed – despite the ravings of an Obamacare-emboldened Democrat congressional majority. The Second American Revolution – known as the Tea Party movement – is not about hate at all. In fact, it is just the opposite. The Tea Party movement is about love. Love of country. Love of the American way of life.  Love of independence and self-determination. Love of American ingenuity, can-do cowboy optimism, and all the opportunity that comes with it. Self-determined opportunity. Not government-created opportunity. The opportunity to see and create something with your own hands. To build a real life of your own and not wait for that life based on the illusion of government promise. Freedom.

“For purple mountains majesty, above the fruited plain…”

Is there anger in the Tea Party movement? Yes. Is there passion? In a way we haven’t seen before. However, anger and passion do not exist independently of love. Human beings are complex creatures and yet so simple. This fundamental truth about the Tea Party movement is something that the media either cannot or refuses to understand: in order to be angry, you first have to care. That’s where the love first comes from. Anger is the flip-side of love’s coin. Today, this anger and love is co-mingled with despair – despair over the government’s casual seizure of our Constitutionally-codified independence. Codified, but not granted, by the Constitution. It is an important distinction that those currently in control of our government have forgotten. If they haven’t forgotten, you would not know it. Yet, it is this fine distinction that makes America so unique in the world.

 “America, America…God shed his grace on thee…”

 After a revolutionary war that left 25,000 brave souls dead in a fight for freedom, Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “Governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed.”  The novel truth of the American quest for independence is that finally, finally the people were the sovereign. Not a monarch and not a government. Moreover, implicit in America’s founding documents, was also the empowering notion that without the consent of the governed, government holds no power over us. And certainly not a federal government that has abused its power, confiscated the people’s freedom through taxation, and arrogantly lined its own pockets to buttress a new privileged political class.

Consequently, America is now at an impasse, a Great Divide that has pitted people against their government. A divide of those who believe in the U.S. Constitution and those that deem it irrelevant. A divide of those that love what America stands and cannot reconcile that love with those who perhaps never really loved America in the first place.

 This love that I speak of is not dependent on being for or against Barack Obama. It is not rooted in opposition to the Democrats' control of Congress. It is not political. It isn’t about being a Democrat or a Republican or - more truthfully - it didn’t have to be. However, it is President Obama and the Democrat-controlled Congress that have now  raised the stakes and threatened all the things that we, as Americans, love about our country. They have threatened America’s very essence. It’s core. That is the true reason that the Tea Party movement exists.

“And crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea…” 

Let us hope that it continues to do so.

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