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As the son of a retail fabric merchant, one of the pointless memories from my youth was watching the guy in the warehouse estimate yardage by holding one end of the questioned fabric in his fully extended left hand while turning his head to the right and using his nose as the point for a one yard measurement. And it worked - at least for rough estimates and for some of the time. Just don’t bet the farm on its accuracy.

And now in our kitchen, by replacing measurements of “a pinch,” “a dollop,” and “a handful” with “a teaspoon,” “a tablespoon” and “a cup,” my wife’s brownies and apricot coffee cakes are more likely to be mind-boggling than merely outstanding.

All of this emphasizes the need for standards by which to plan our efforts and our future rather than simply using gut-feelings of good or bad or possible. And nowhere is the need for thorough, realistic planning more consequential than in planning the rules and regulations by which to govern our nation.

And that is the trouble with our current approach to the basic problems of governance. We tend to start by choosing between our personal pleasures and aversions, then designing our nation’s future according to those prejudices. But that just won’t work.

The Tea Party, for example, is gaining strength on the basis of the fears they project or the Nirvana they fantasize. They are against big government and big budgets, but voice nothing more substantive than slogans of hope and hate. Their most unifying anger is the discomfort of taxes and their most motivating fear is of future tax increases, but they offer no alternative source of funding beyond doing without.

They have no plan or analysis of how society might work without the assistance of taxes to fund our police and fire departments, or to keep our highway system intact and military strong, or how to keep our libraries and public education up to date and operating. In short, they have no idea of what comes next, and no vision of what the future might portend.

There must be an identifiable set of principles by which to build our nation and measure our progress - a measurement more substantive than simply not liking taxes. Otherwise, decisions for all our society and our children and the future of our nation will be made according to the short-term personal idiosyncrasies of those who are charged with planning and enforcement rather than by the ideals, which should be our guide.

And we do have such a guide, the original one embedded in the introduction to our Constitution. Unfortunately, for much of our more conservative electorate, notably the Tea Party, that guide to our national purpose and character seems to be overlooked or dismissed as grossly outdated. The Preamble, they will note, has not a single reference to excessive taxation, nor does it mention gay marriage or welfare mothers or abortion rights.

Nor, of course, should it. The Preamble is concerned with the direction and obligations of our society, with the goals and aspirations of our society. It is those goals that define our nation - the goals, not the tactics of achieving them - that make us unique in all world history. If our taxes are too high or our programs inefficient or our views outdated, then correct them - revise them - improve them. But we must not just dismiss them, allowing them to fade as a consequence of disinterest or oversight.

Many of our people are so offended by taxes that they simply disregard the national pain and hardship serious tax reductions would generate, focusing instead on that single source of discomfort. Rather than retreating into our cocoon of comfort we should perhaps struggle to improve the efficiency of our system - not abandon all the glory that had been ours and that had once defined us. The ever-widening space between our nation’s needy and ourselves, our decreasing concern with the welfare of neighbors who are not family, is a dangerous symptom of our decline.

Robert Faber Ann Arbor

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