Decency
Post 1,006
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There is much craziness parading through our society and our politics today and it causes great harm. Examples happening today:
Do you think Governor DeSantis should be guarding the door to your OB-GYN to keep you out?
Do you think some self-important bully or self-appointed guardian of everything should make decisions about what your children can read?
Surely, your answer to both questions is NO, but we are awash in this power grabbing, rights killing insanity anyway. There is a predicate to this.
For several months in 1954 Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his witch hunt and career destruction committee, commonly called the Army-McCarthy Hearings, inflicted great harm on many quite innocent people wholly undeserving of his cruelty. McCarthy falsely stated that he had a list of names of people working in the State Department who were communists and he presented himself as the hero who would root them out. His fraudulent accusations knew no bounds and were the “alternative facts” of that era, as he attacked blameless people like a hungry hyena.
Finally, on June 9 McCarthy violated an agreement and branded as a communist a young lawyer working in the office of Joseph Welch, Chief Counsel for the United States Army. Welch could contain himself no longer and said,
Little did I dream that you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is true he is still with Hale and Dorr. It is true that he will continue to be with Hale and Dorr. It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you.
Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?
Substitute for Sen. McCarthy our Republicans in congress today. They do and say horrific things. They vilify innocent people and sacrifice our national values to gin up “the base,” the fearful, angry mob of Americans seeking retribution for whatever ills they can conjure.
These legislators today do their cruelty for the very same reason McCarthy did his: to garner power for themselves. They are as heedless of the harm they do to others as was McCarthy. They haven’t a care at all for the harm they do to our country,
Joseph Welch’s compassionate protection of his young associate proved to be the beginning of the end of McCarthy’s reign of terror. McCarthy was censured by the Senate and not long after that died of complications from alcoholism.
We are in a moment not unlike that of those dreadful, predatory 1954 hearings, now with fraudulent claims about elections, slippery insinuations and false accusations that groundlessly demonize our fellow citizens. We suffer the division and malice of the extremists and the barely masked calls to violence. How will we get out of this?
Who today will issue the message calling for decency that will shock our nation to its senses? Who has the moral standing and the moral sense that Joseph Welch had on that June day in 1954? Who will deliver the message we all know we so critically, even desperately need to hear? Who will challenge those with self-serving hatred and greed, the extremists with their disdain for the values our patriots fought and died to protect? We dearly need a Joseph Welch right now.
Indeed, at long last, have we a sense of decency?
Quote of Mid-Week
“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from old ones” (updated/corrected 11/1/23, 12:20PM with great thanks to Mardy Grothe)
– John Maynard Keynes, English Economist 1883-1946
We need a great many of our fellow citizens to abandon old, destructive ideas.
The Good Question Department
From pal MZ:
How come they are counting the dead bodies in Gaza but not in Ukraine? Russia is bombing Ukraine every day.
Today is a good day to be the light
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- Fire the bastards!
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