Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Time to Take a Stand

Somewhere in the Capitol building in Washington is a dark room where severed testicles hang from meathooks drying like raisins in the sun.

The excised cojones once belonged to agencies like the IRS, OSHA, EPA and others originally created to protect the public interest against predations by private interests -- and to all the Democrats elected to federal office in the last 25 years.

For Republicans they are trophies, like the Indian scalps of the post-bellum westward expansion by white Americans.  For the common citizens of the sick republic, they are testament to the need for a viable third party of the left.  Let the Republicans continue their rightward swing into mass dementia.  Let the Democrats continue to simper like center-right eunuchs, standing for nothing, spewing words, words, words. But give voters of intelligence a new party fielding candidates with the courage to stand for all the difficult reforms that might one day restore a semblance of democracy to these shores.

Let Schumer and other castrati in the Senate join with the 47 treasonous Republicans in sabotaging the Iran nuclear framework, as they have done in sanctioning the Corker amendment.  But at least give us a choice, a party of proud liberals, calling out the corporate whores for their sedition and offering the electorate a choice — sanity, peace, social progress, enlightenment.

Where are the men and women of integrity who, if elected, stand by their promises of the campaign trail?  Of transparent government?  Of ending torture and respecting human rights? 

Where are the men and women with the courage to declare that health care is one of those human rights and insist that a single-payer system is the democratic way to achieve it?

Where are the men and women with the wisdom to to show us how, in a true democracy, workers receive their fair share of the profits from private enterprise, and the CEOs receive only their fair share?

Where are the men and women whose priorities call for mending broken American infrastructure, putting Americans back to work, fixing a failed education system and restoring justice?  Who refuse to permit the citizens  of the country to remain slaves of a military-industrial oligarchy?

Where are the truth-seekers who think the founders had a worthwhile idea in the separation of church and state?  Who can stand up to the tyrannical preachments of the religious right and tell them, “You are free to believe what your so-called faith demands, but you are not free to impose those beliefs on the rest of us.”

Where  are the men who are manly enough to cede absolute equality to women, and to those of other colors, or different sexual orientations?

Where are those who understand that in a nation this large, this diverse, only a strong federal government can guarantee the rights of individuals vs. corporations, of humanity vs. the military, of minorities vs. the privileged few?

Where are the enlightened souls who know to leaven power with love, to heed the voices of their better angels, whose only litmus test for office is unrelenting dedication to the service of the people, all the people, all the time?

Have we sunk so low as a nation that these goals are out of reach? Surely there must still be among us such people as believe in them and would lead us toward them.

Our only hope as a nation is that enough of them will come together and  form a powerful political alternative to the dreadful fools in whose hands our government now rests.