I’m not an historian. In fact, I’ve never been interested in reading history and yet I do mass quantities of reading whenever I can. So it was very unusual that I recently found myself reading The Real George Washington published by the National Center for Constitutional Studies.

It was even more unusual that I could not put the book down.

It seems the real George Washington was not someone I was ever exposed to throughout my 20 years of public and private education. The real George Washington was a pillar of physical and moral courage since unmatched. It’s almost impossible to briefly reference his remarkable, and sometimes miraculous, accomplishments as they were so numerous. In fact, when the authors tried to do just that after 601 fact-filled pages, it took them 3 pages to just outline them in list form!

However, what has had the most impact upon me, given our current state of political disrepair, was Washington’s disdain and even fear of political parties. The then Federalist and Republican parties were born of the irreconcilable philosophical differences between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Washington did what he could to bring them together but to no avail.

His foresight led him to fear for the destructive influences of political parties and he spoke “in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party… This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension,…is itself a frightful despotism… A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest instead of warming it should consume.”

So here we are now being consumed by the very fire of which he spoke.

While many are hoping the November mid-term elections return control of the House and the Senate to Republican hands so as to place a check upon this President’s agenda, I hold out no such illusion.

It matters not which of these two parties control either the House or the Senate since they have both become so internally corrupted and adversarial for opposition’s sake alone, that the cure is not either but neither.

Perhaps we should be seeking another George Washington… or the equivalent amount of courage and integrity within ourselves… to put forth a solution that does away with both these ailing dinosaurs we call “Republicans” and “Democrats.”

Perhaps it’s time to actually, and finally, live the words:

“One Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

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