Political Cowardice and the Big Freeze
Small minds, big ambitions set us up for disasters
I’ve done some pretty low-down things in my life. Spin the wheel of bad behavior and I’ve landed on most of the common spots — lying, cheating, stealing, drugging and drinking. Let’s just say I wasted none of the time I wandered in the wasteland. I take no pride in any of it, but I want to be as transparent as possible while I stand in my glass house throwing stones at others.
Being out of control doesn’t lessen or repair the damage that befell others whose paths crossed mine, but as wayward as I was, I was not intentional — not like the current quiver of slithering reptiles who inhabit the carcass of the Republican Party.
With the insurrectionist attack on the Capitol only six weeks into history, the Trumpian acolytes have returned to the altar of Mar a Lago, Kevin McCarthy bending a knee before that tiny-fingered hand and Lindsey Graham teeing up on the golf course what he imagines to be his post-McConnell leadership of the Senate. (Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are not worth mentioning because they will always ride in the back seat of the clown car.) Josh Hawley, representing the next litter, is even more overtly ambitious. A Harvard education is no match for a rampaging ego.
Setting aside the looney-tunes faction of the right — Jewish space-laser Marjorie Taylor Greene and my-cold-dead-fingers Lauren Boebert — who can’t be held responsible for their actions because they are, well, witless, what’s got me to wondering these days is this:
How far does someone have to drift from the true north of their moral compass to get as immorally lost as Graham, McCarthy, Hawley and their ilk? And how can they stomach the betrayal of what they were taught to be right and good?
As I said, my magnetic needle spun wildly, but even in the darkest of the longest of nights I knew — I knew! — in which direction lay the light. As much as I attempted at times to convince myself otherwise, persuade myself I didn’t care about the consequences of my actions, I did care, and it was that ache I followed to find the way out.
If I cared and I knew that I had crossed the boundary from goodness into lowness — I, an uneducated kid from a factory town who knew nothing of the world — there is no question these well-educated, self-entitled Trump sucklings are aware of their moral debasement. They act with deliberation, not on…
