A few days ago, I had an on-line discussion with one of my fellow bleeding-heart’s about the recent election results. In this discussion I opined that armed revolution was the only way to flush the special interest money out of American politics and to limit terms. I expressed the view that the path to eliminating the spectacle of professional politicians who walk through the revolving door from decades in office to making some real money as lobbyists is the path of the revolutionary. I felt cocky and self-satisfied; an old commie who still wears a beret and has not lost his proletarian edge.
And then I picked up the Sunday paper, and now I hang my head in shame.
Words matter, and I take it all back.
The politicians and pundits whose vicious invective inspired an unhinged young man to assault and to murder all those innocent folks in Tucson have blood on their hands now. The best of those people know it, and they won’t sleep well for a long time. I don’t ever want to feel like that.
Thirty odd miles from here is Gettysburg. The bucolic National Park battlefield is mostly quiet in winter, as are the endless rows of headstones. The silence and the gentle landscape, and the intervening years all serve to shelter us from the barbaric legacy of insoluble political differences settled with guns. This is not an experiment that bears repeating; a conclusion any of those poor kids in the cemetery would surely support.
I still think we need to get the money the hell out of Washington and the state capitals so decisions are made based on what’s good for the country, not what’s good for a re-election war chest. . I still think politicians should be term limited; politics should be years sacrificed for public service, not a career. I still think we need single-payer socialized health care. I still think we need more schools and fewer jails, more woods and fewer gas derricks, more tolerance and less anger, more trains and fewer trucks and cars, fewer people and less poverty. I still think there is a time and place for civil disobedience, but I am not willing to spill blood. I am hardly Gandhi or Martin Luther King or Mother Theresa, but I will continue to work peaceably for the goals I believe in, and I will sure as hell watch what I say!
Peace!
