Yes It Can

By Keith R. Schmitz

Every documentary series that Ken Burns offers up on PBS is poetry in motion pictures. His latest on National Parks is no exception.

Burns was on Morning Joe this morning and Mike Barnicle posed the question would it be possible for the national parks to come into being in today's political climate.

Think of it. People are now throwing hysterical screaming fits over health care reform, something that could benefit them directly. Imagine someone proposing taking land out of private ownership and using government money to make these expanses available to the public. FOX "News" would be bursting out of your TV screens. Not that the right wing isn't doing their lion's share to starve the national parks that we do have now to death.

It was brought up that government can't do anything right. Burns proceeded to reel off a list of benefits that we have enjoyed from our government starting with the Declaration of Independence all the way up to the federal highway building programs. But of course the townhall screamers would call Burns a socialist Nazi commie vegetarian fruitcake.

It is no doubt that the ideological blindness of the right would not perceive the beauty of the national parks, overlooking of course crunchy conservatives. No wonder we are not the man on the moon generation. Too busy worrying about how taxes would affect our IRA's has blasted away at the greatness of this country. Tax cuts have built nothing and if we were in charge the national parks would be laced with cul de sacs.