Obsidian Wings: Failures of Imagination:
If we’re safe, it’s not because of any of virtue on our part. It’s because of a blind, lucky accident of birth. Or, depending on your interpretation, because our parents, grandparents, or more distant ancestors risked the journey here from someplace else. Or because exactly 228 years and 5 days ago, a group of Englishmen imagined a different sort of country.
I don’t have to look all that far back to see an Englishman who imagined something different: my father emigrated for a better life, more opportunity, more than 30 years ago. Not all the immigrants who come to the US hoping for the future are historical figures. Some of them are still available to have a beer with.
This made for some pretty disturbing reading, especially after a couple of glasses of two buck Chuck on a Friday night.
This won’t be the first time I have thought about my old workplace: don’t worry if you didn’t read the entry (I can’t find it right now), but I have mentioned that a professor there took her own life. She was one of the world’s foremost scholars on human rights, and it looks like we could use someone of her probity and diligence right about now.
This country is founded on choices. People chose to come here. Of those who came in the early days, some chose to stay, others to leave (a lot their descendants live in Canada, where I came ashore on this continent). And the choices never stop. You get choose where you live, what you want to do, who you marry, how many kids to have, who gets to run the country, and what they are going to do.
As much as I hope the incumbents of the executive branch are retired, come November, at bottom, I hope that whatever decision is made — by each and every voter — is a decision, not an impulse, not a protest. A carefully thought-out decision, tested in discussions at the dinner table, at the local bar, over a working lunch, and in the privacy of our own thoughts. It’s not too much to ask, especially when you recall that the founders pledged their lives for your right to make it.
Obsidian Wings: Failures of Imagination:
Our leaders answer to us–slowly, reluctantly, and only when they think it puts their re-election in danger, but in the end they do answer to us. We have a say in all this. We do not have to become this kind of country. We do not have to torture people or send them to torturers. We do not have to let Jefferson’s eloquent phrases become empty slogans mouthed to justify anything. We do not have to put up with this shit. If it were our relatives being waterboarded and abused and deported, we would not put up with it.