The 9/12 project represents the credo of the Tea Party Movement. It is nine lines that mention the pronoun "I" ten times and the pronoun "me" four times.

     The words we and us never appear because the Tea Party Patriots are the "me generation" incarnate. This is especially obvious if we compare the Tea Party's celebration of "Me" to America's Best Idea: The National Parks (written by Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns).

   Here is Tea Party belief number one: "America is good". This is a blanket statement, thrown over a bed that includes, for example, slavery, colonialism (the Philippines and Puerto Rico), and prejudice so raw and odious that it excluded an entire nation -China in 1882- from any chance to participate in the American Dream.

    A person rooted in reality would argue that the history of any nation includes good and evil; the Tea Party Patriots ignore history, especially the I and We battles central to the creation of America's National Parks.

      Here is a contrast: Traveling in Kansas in 1874, a train encountered a buffalo herd so vast  that the train waited three hours for the herd to pass. Six years later all-American hunters disposed of waiting lines by creating a literal mountain of bison skulls. Untold thousands of heads sit in a heap, waiting to be turned into dollar signs by Michigan's Carbon Works.  Not to be outdone, other hunters slaughtered every Yellowstone elk they could find. In one picture, the dead elk neatly line the long walk of a railroad station. Bystanders celebrate their kills while a young boy of say six stands at the front of the elk carcasses. He is smilingly carrying a shotgun that is bigger than he is.

   Creating the Great Smoky Mountain National Park involved long battles with loggers who put a quick buck way ahead of preserving the forests for us, for future generations of Americans.. Shortly before the park's creation, lumberjacks "frantically cut the old-growth forests" within the park's proposed boundaries at the rate of sixty acres a day. And even after the American people owned the land, some lumber companies continued cutting. As one logger boasted, ""Boys, we sold it. Log her." And they did. Or, as one worker noted, "when we got done with that poor little ridge, there wasn't a toothpick left on it."

   Forget the ugly and there is no way to appreciate the beautiful. The history of the National Parks is constantly contentious because there are always Americans willing to extinguish a species or a forest as they laugh their way to the bank and the next hill of toothpicks.

     America is good. And often wantonly oblivious to anything but what I want, when I want it.

     So, when Congress and the Presidents encountered greed incarnate, they often did something anathema to the Tea Party Patriots: They substantially increased the power of the Federal government. Indeed, the National Parks would not exist without centralization of power in the hands of the National state. For example, when Congress passed the Antiquities Act of 1906, it gave the President "the exclusive authority to preserve places that would be called, not national parks, but national monuments." When some Americans wanted to create a national park at the Grand Canyon, other Americans fiercely resisted any restrictions that hindered ranchers, miners, or settlers who would force visitors to pay for use of a bathroom. President Roosevelt responded by first making the Grand Canyon a national monument and that executive declaration saved the Canyon for its present purpose: A spectacular park that is preserved for "our children's children".

   Reasonable people can argue about the transfer of so much power to one person. But the history of the parks suggest another point ignored by the Tea Party Patriots. When an issue is interstate, when the aim is to create natural, national shrines, how can that be done without ceding power to the only entity with sovereignty across the fifty states?  Moreover, the people with power love America just as much as the Tea Party activists. When park visitation passed two million Americans in 1925, Parks Director Stephen Mather told anyone who would listen that "this will go far in developing a love and pride in own country and a realization of what a wonderful place it is."

        Not bad for a government bureaucrat. Or any real American.

      A final point concerns a visit to Concepción, Chile. My colleagues and I took a group of students to visit a coal mine. Some fainted when they reached the mine's bottom; even for small folks it was a tight and gloomy fit. Meanwhile, upstairs, the grounds outside the mine contained a magnificent park. However, as our guide explained, when the mine operated only the mine owner and his family used the park. Everyone else watched the rich abuse the poor.

   Move from Chile to the Yosemite Valley in 1865 and you immediately understand why the parks could be called America's best idea. As Frederick Law Olmsted wrote, "the enjoyment of the choicest natural scenes in the country and the means of recreation connected with them is  a monopoly, in a very peculiar manner, of a very few, very rich people." Thus, in establishing a set of ideals for National Parks Olmsted wrote that "it is the main duty of government...to provide means of protection for all its citizens in the pursuit of happiness against the obstacles, otherwise insurmountable, which the selfishness of individuals or combinations of individuals is likely to interpose to that pursuit."

      In sharp contrast to the "me generation" of Tea Party Patriots, the National Parks exemplify those who think in terms of us and we. Again quoting Stephen Mather, when a visitor encounters Yosemite or Grand Teton National Park, "perhaps for the first time, one realizes the common America-and loves it...it is enforced democracy and the sense of common ownership that works this magic."

        WE would not have the parks without a transfer of power to the Federal government. And WE could not use those parks to champion America and our common citizenship unless somebody put us ahead of me, me, me.

     We are 300 million strong. Unless the Tea Party focus on the I weakens an ideal that can easily be extended from the National Parks to issues like National Health Insurance.

  We are one, if we want to be.