Tom's mountain

"Monticello" means "little mountain" in Italian and it's the name of Thomas Jefferson's estate. Before he called it this though Jefferson and his best friend Dabney Carr affectionately called it "Tom's mountain."

Jefferson was climbing metaphorical mountains at an early age and the steps he carved into the country's symbolic landscape are the path we should be following. However with Bush and the Republicans, both nationally and locally, we have fallen off the trail. It is so much harder today for the majority of Americans to aspire to Jefferson's imagined utopia of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The economy is in a slow down, debt is rising, the housing market is abysmal, it costs a fortune to go to college and our country is at war in two countries and is threatening to enter a third. What kind of life and liberty is this? We're not pursuing happiness, we're pursuing economic and environmental oblivion. We've seemingly fallen off "Tom's mountain" entirely.

When the Boston Tea Party was held Jefferson enlisted Virginians to show their collective support by a day of fasting. It led to The Continental Congress which blazed the trail for The Declaration of Independence. Interestingly, what led to the Boston Tea Party is England needing money to pay for another war, so they implemented a tax on the British American colony. This incensed the American colonists and one little tea party became the first step carved into the mountain of American independence.

Bush and Congress should learn the lesson of the other King across the pond, the one who lost his prized possession when he needed more funding for a war and tried to garner it on the backs of Americans.

We need a leader who will get us back to "Tom's mountain."