The Enemy Within

What can I say about the Federal government shutdown--topic number one for this week and who knows how many more weeks--that hasn't ably been said elsewhere?

Nothing, I guess.  So why write at all?

Well, other than to record my personal outrage, which exceeds the scale of this or any other blog, it is to make one simple point, one that needs to be made over and over again.

This is not a "plague on both their houses."

This is a plague that emanates, as President Obama put it, from one faction of one party of one-half of one branch of government.  Or, as I wrote previously, this is the work of a Fifth Column in our midst.

But trust me.  The members of this Fifth Column are not smart or brave enough to get there all by themselves.   They had help.  From the rest of us.  And, specifically, from the so-called "progressive" community.

For decade after decade, culminating in the disaster of 2010, the members of this community sat at home, "bravely" thinking that all that was needed was a state of affairs when things were bad enough, and the people would suddenly rise up as one, and all would be well.

We may very well have reached that stage, finally.  Only there is no end game. Not, at least, a peaceful one.  Neither side can budge without losing face, at best, and at worst triggering a full-scale rebellion by its followers that can only further poison our badly contaminated well of political discourse.

We are reliably told that, this time, things will be different, that Democrats in Congress have "grown a spine."  Let's hope and pray they have.  But how much different things might have been, how much easier it might have been to escape the current crisis--hell, to avoid it altogether--if they'd grown that spine earlier?  Why didn't they do it?

The truth, very simply, is this:  the Fifth Column known as the Tea Party is only one-half of the enemy within.  The other half is the so-called "progressive" community, so committed to due process and so loathe to get its fingernails dirty that its members have been willing to wait for the people to "rise up," so they could be spared the indignity of fighting.

Sadly, I am sorry to say, life doesn't work that way.  It never has.  It never will.

I am very proud to have, as my father-in-law, a man who fought at Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge in World War II.  A man who has fought all of his life to build a business, to raise a family, to marry a second time and accept another family as his own, to take care of others who were not as fortunate as he his.  Now, at the age of 90, he is fighting for his life, working in physical therapy to gain enough strength to have surgery for the repair of a blocked artery.  When I visited him recently, he gave me this advice:  to always fight, and to remember that fighting is the key to living.

I wish that those of us on the "progressive" side of the fence could and would fight half as hard as my father-in-law has fought, and is fighting now.  Had we done so, starting thirty years ago and continuing on up to the present, there might have been no Bushes in the White House.  No 9/11.  No nine-digit budget deficit, or eleven-digit national debt.  No 99% versus 1%.  The line in the sand we could very easily drawn decades ago is the line we absolutely have to draw now, at far greater cost, or democracy in this country will effectively end.  Perhaps forever.

Obama really got it right when he said that we, all of us, are the change that we seek.  Not some magical leader, or even a magical political party.  All of us, together.  E pluribus unum.

So stand strong.  Be vocal.  Be confrontational.  Be brave enough to do what my father-in-law, and many others like him, have already done--to put everything on the line for the sake of the future.  To fight like hell, even at the risk of great personal sacrifice.  And that includes not only fighting the GOP and its Tea Bagger allies, but also the media, which has for decades repeating the plague-on-both-your houses narrative after being bullied by the right over non-existent "bias."  Fighting is the only way to keep the Democrats' "spine" will stay in place.  

The only way that America can remain the land of the free is if it also remains the home of the brave.  Are you brave enough to fight?  Are you brave enough to at least vote in every election from now on, and not hope that your enemies are some kind of "self-solving" problem that will resolve itself?  I hope so and pray so.

Because, otherwise, we won't be the land of the free much longer.