In the world of the current political conservatives, there is a fondness of the political philosophy of Edmund Burke the Irish-born member of the English parliament who is remembered for his support of the cause of the American Revolutionaries, and for his later opposition to the French Revolution. Burke was praised by both conservatives and liberals in the 19th century. Since the 20th century, he has generally been viewed as the philosophical founder of modern Conservatism.Burke opined that there is something about war and violence that that makes the human being feel most alive. In Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, he develops a view of the self desperately in need of negative stimuli of the sort provided by pain and danger. But as Burke warned, it’s always best to enjoy pain and danger at a distance.  Distance and obscurity enhance the sense of being alive; nearness and illumination bring one closer to the reality of death, pain and the damages that violence leaves in its wake

In the current environment of our political exchange – and it seems the course of government in my lifetime – there is a penchant to rush to war or counter revolution (one for every decade of my life), to engage in the vitriolic, the battle cry and the polemic, to chant for the overthrow of the ruling entity – under the guise of a righteousness of one’s cause.  And so the elites journey and set their vision on the mountain top.

A congressional elite send someone else’s children to war – and those children become adults carrying the actual vision of the pain and danger that shapes and burdens their lives.  Ask any veteran of combat.

The political elite send extol the virtues of their particular political view – largely in the context of the language of violence to truth in political advertising – and they become freshmen members of Congress who hold a nation and their own political party hostage in order to “starve the beast” in the long view.  In the short view, the ranks of the poor and near poor, swell and life gets a bit harder and closer to the edge. This year, for the fourth consecutive year according to the US Census Bureau, the number of households in which there was chronic hunger grew – and Florida is a state that is in the “top ten” – a dubious honor at best. The reports no longer use the term “hunger”; the technical term is now “very low food security.” No matter what you call it, the number is the highest reported in the 52 years of tracking such things. Also growing are the number of families in the “low food security” group – families in which their access to adequate food is limited by a lack of money and other resources food intake reduced and meal patterns disrupted.

Think of the messages we will all hear in the coming election campaigns. How many will hoist up the banner of pain in our lives – from which they can relieve us?  How many will hoist up the banner of danger to our lives – from which they can protect us?  How many will point out the mountain top?

The elite point out the mountaintop and send the others to the reality of that place, where the air becomes thin, the view clouded.  Where the wars are fought, the battle engaged, the people live closer to the edge. At the end of every elite’s speech with its penchant for confrontation, violence, deconstruction of the systems they do not like – at the end lies a waiting disappointment.  Rarely theirs.