To the Editor:
The title of this letter is a rephrasing of the old expression “You are what you eat,” meaning your diet absolutely informs your physical makeup.
Eat healthy, be healthy. Eat a high carb, fatty diet and see how bloated we get to be no matter how much we convince ourselves otherwise in the drive-thru line.
This is as valid for our mental makeup as it is for our physical. Make truth and decency our diet and that’s how we are shaped.
Accept lies, alibis, vulgarity and cruelty and watch how quickly and surely one’s life sinks to that level.
Ask any beaten spouse who accepts abuse because it’s too terrifying to face the alternatives. Talk to parents whose kids start calling the shots, women in the workplace who ignore the bosses inappropriate touching. Take trash and live in trash.
The great political divide in our country is not over conservative and liberal policy issues, it’s about deception and perception. It’s about recognizing things for what they are and not for what we’d like them to be. It’s about how we’re willing to face reality.
No issue, no facts, no matter how clearly argued, will be seen by the person who doesn’t want to see.
Most recently we had the spectacle of the Senate impeachment “trial.”
There’s not a man, woman, or child in the country, THE WORLD, who believes it’s right to reach a decision without the facts. No witnesses, no evidence…“No fair!”
Still, the GOP spins such laughable arguments as Alan Dershowitz’s “If the President thinks his re-election is good for the country, there can be no wrongdoing.”
And let’s not forget illegally trying to identify the whistleblower, and the president’s deer-in-the-headlights lawyer, Pat Cipollone, awkwardly filling his allotted time trying to look serious while feebly repeating the word “Ridiculous.”
This is what the GOP’s alternative view of Constitutional responsibility looks like…head-shaking emptiness offered as a defense to a jury whose sworn impartiality was the biggest joke of all.
There is a clarity, however, to such lazy and transparent deceit.
The GOP served it up because they figured their base would choke it down. And what contempt does that show for their own?
Just this —“You let us do it before, you’ll do it again. You’ll forget about it, get over it by election day.”
Except this isn’t how the world works.
There’s a gravity to misdeeds that pulls us ever downward. Allowed to continue, bottom-line rationalization for quick “wins” leads us predictably and inevitably to the very bottom.
We shouldn’t have to — couldn’t possibly — list all the lies and spins we’ve been offered. An honest survey of one’s memory knows.
Continue to tolerate such deception and our character will become like the President’s…plastic. The GOP Senate has already succumbed but is dependent on complicity. There is, after all, a reciprocal quality to this downward spiral.
“Accept what we do and we’ll be able to do more of it, etc., etc.”
So, if after the trial you’re still cheering for “winning injustice” — some questions come to mind:
• Just how sheer a veil of plausibility is enough to let you hide from your own conscience?
• What kind of personal character, what kind of country do you want?
• Just how much can a person close his eyes to and swallow?
