Let’s Get Real

 

The problems we face as a people and as a nation are grave and serious. Our leadership and our legislators are for the most part a pretty feckless bunch. IT’s time to demand a better quality of leader. I don’t agree with a lot of the things that Peggy Noonan says, but four years or so ago, she wrote what I believe was an illuminating op-ed piece where she chided our senators for being overly focused on what they can do for their state – she reminded them that we do not call a senator a “state senator” – instead each is the “US Senator from the State of XXXX”. It ought to be the same with congress. It’s certainly the same with the US President. Party affiliation always comes after the affirmation that the man or woman represents all of who are citizens of these United States.  Maybe its time that we all see ourselves as Americans first and realize that affiliations are not the automatic dividers that we make them out to be. Let us be clear — divisions have always existed, and will always exist – and if you think that the first generation of men and women who built  our nation were kinder and gentler, a reading of any US newspaper of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century would dispel that notion with astonishing rapidity. The rough and tumble of public discourse has always involved ad hominem and straw man attacks. With the advent of fact checking websites, we have a chance to hold people accountable that was not possible before. And yet, the tide of blind allegiance is higher than it has been in a long time. The haste of the Tea Party and Radical Left to throw the baby out with the bathwater, to search for the perfection of black and white absolutes at the expense of getting along in the real world is driving our nation to a very bad place. When congress can place balancing the budget above disaster relief, or uses it as some kind of cosmic shell game where dollars and people are in balance something is deeply wrong. The original Republicans were a different breed than today’s Republicans — Lincoln believed that the government should do everything it could do to help people — he would not recognize these people who seem to have more in common with 19th century Dickens characters (Gradgrind). Moreover, these supposed Christians have forgotten Jesus Christ’s first dictum — Love thy neighbor as thyself. It’s easy in this world to seek out those who are most like you, but the heart of the Christian idea all men and women are equal, that all have worth. Equal valuation of a person’s spirit leads in the end leads to equality before the law. Eisenhower had it right when he explained that we were a nation built on Judaeo-Christian values. We are also were and are a nation born of the Enlightenment — any attempt to deny the value of scientific methods and thought is a denial of the depth of the men and women who struggled to create a nation from a fractious and stubborn lot of colonials, each with his/her own idea of the shape that  this new confederation should take.