To the Editor:
Somewhere in this no-man’s land of distrust and bad faith that we all live in these days, there needs to be the protective cover of reason and honor.
Our country has eroded in the eyes of the world because we have let slip away from us principle by principle, all that we claim to stand for. We have done this in our private lives and, in turn, in our public institutions.
We have done so under the illusion that we are gaming the system with shortcuts to winning when we don’t seem to know ourselves well enough to recognize what real winning feels like. Winning feels like pride. Its face is a smile, not a smirk.
It’s counting all your strokes in golf and still getting a good score. It’s making a sacrifice to help a friend. It’s being unflinchingly honest with ourselves and glimpsing truth.
We defined our country in an outburst of idealism and practicality that was embodied as our Constitution. It gave us something to guide us when human nature might betray us. It gave us something to believe in about ourselves, something worth saluting and standing up for at ballgames.
We plucked honor from the high thin air of dreams and hope, wrote it down in our best hand, and trusted it’s beauty would sustain us forever. We don’t seem to see that beauty anymore. Dreams and hope are tied to the future and that, for a variety of reasons, is very much an uncertainty for all of us.
In the land of the here-and-now, we have a culture populated by actors and salesmen, whether their business is soap, condos, payday loans, politics or…you name it. We are told we’re worth it, should have it now, and should have it all. We’ve come to believe this and that’s how we’ve come to be what we are — short-sighted, grasping, and unsatisfied.
The impeachment trial underway now is a climax point in testing whether we can rise to what we say we stand for.
This isn’t just a few days that history will hardly notice. This a benchmark test of whether we the people, individual by individual, can break through the traps of tribalism and shortsightedness to once again demand honesty from ourselves and our representatives.
Right now the basic openness of our democracy is in extreme jeopardy. In our most solemn of judicial processes evidence and witnesses are being restricted, not just to ensure a verdict (that’s all but insured in the GOP controlled Senate), but to make certain the people don’t even get a clear look at what has taken place.
The president’s party won’t let his own people be called to testify (Mick Mulvaney, John Bolton, etc.). Defiance of subpoenas and blanket document burial is being condoned by the GOP.
Democracy cannot function in the dark.
We’re being treated like fools. Some of us are expected to swallow anything for the sake of party. Most recently, President Trump said, for instance, that he doesn’t know shady middleman, Lev Parnas, and sticks to that story despite scads of newly released photos of them buddying together.
That should be hard to choke down even for a following that’s been trained to double-down lies since the president’s pitiful inauguration day crowd size inflation.
Loyalty has its place but it can be misplaced, and that’s the working premise that this impeachment trial is being run on by Mitch McConnell and company. “As long as we can keep our boys mad, they’ll look the other way.”
Well, the “other way” is to give up what’s left of our principles.
You decide.
You’ll never have a more important occasion. And if you can’t rouse yourself to stand up for America now we don’t see why you should rise from your seat at the next playing of the national anthem.
Gasconade County Democrats Club
gasconadedems.org
