Category: Later, in commentary (Page 1 of 76)

Hope vanished in a puff of orange smoke. That’s what I was thinking—I could not help but think—back in November 2024. I’ve tried since then to reclaim hope. But it feels as if progress, our progress as a nation built on fundamental values, has been indefinitely suspended. We are unable to agree about what a more perfect union would look like, or what we could hope for our future. Many people have tuned out, unwilling—and uninterested—to engage in the relentless small-bore politics of the daily news.

It is not that we have been led backwards to an earlier time. No such luck. We cannot, unfortunately, go back to a past that has vanished. The Civil Rights Era and the Great Society days are times I lived through. Those days were not without troubles and conflict. But though those days have vanished, they now represent in my mind days of progress, days when despite it all, there was a greater sense of national cohesion.

We are not moving backward in time, and we certainly are not moving back to a time of imagined “greatness.” Time does not work that way.

We are perpetually going forward. Today, we are marching forward into a future that looks increasingly dark. Greatness and justice have been retooled to mean pretty much the opposite of what they once meant. The former has been conflated with cruelty and power. Among those who now lead us there is an obsession with bigness and wealth, but not bigness of heart or wealth of fairness. Justice has been perverted to mean justice for some but not for all. Our leaders care more for the gilded candlestick than for the light of the candle.

Much of what passes for governance these days is sham. It is performance, not honesty. Among certain members of Congress, governance requires no thought. Their pathetic concept of governing is nothing more than reaction driven by fear and weak spine. Meanwhile, the laws are not being faithfully executed. The Constitution is not being preserved, protected, or defended.

America used to be guided by time-honored principles and values. We declared truths to be self-evident. Values were as simple and fundamental as the Golden Rule of doing unto others as we would have them do unto us. We claimed rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Dishonesty was a thing to be condemned. To lie was to be branded as a man or woman not of one’s word.

Is a government of values and principles now slipping away?

How long can we endure a time of wholesale dishonesty and deceit?

How can we tolerate a government that instructs masked and anonymous agents to grab people off the street for deportation and punishment without explanation and without opportunity to contest that action?

How can we promote a moral life while our elected representatives rip health services from millions while showering tax cuts on some whose enormous wealth plainly fails to justify paying less than their share?

And how can we allow our government, in our name, to take America’s surplus food from children across the globe who today are dying of hunger while the food rots in warehouses?

I have too many questions such as these. There is barely a ray of hope behind the dark clouds. Yet hope’s light still burns in the greater politics of the land of liberty—the politics of shared national pride and lifted voices.

We have shared hope in the honor of diversity before the word “diversity” was corrupted. We have shared hope in the shared ambition for equity before the word “equity” was corrupted. We have shared hope in the righteous virtue of inclusion before the word “inclusion” was corrupted. When our great nation was born, its people mutually pledged to each other their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. There is yet time to remember and reaffirm that mutual pledge.

Views: 0

Some other stuff for later,