The Hollow Men: This Is The Way We End, Not With A Bang But with a Whimper

 It is not the intransigence and boldness of our adversaries we will remember, but the irresolute cowardice of our friends.

--Mad Dog

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

--Martin Luther King

Cowardice asks the question: Is it safe?

--Martin Luther King

A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are built for.

--W.G.Thayer Shedd

Even a dead fish can go with the flow

--Jim Hightower

The tyranny of some is possible only through the cowardice of others

--Jose Rizal

The unkindest cut of all

--Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang

But with a Whimper

--T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"

The Ignominious Eight

The hardest part is not seeing our own two U.S. Senators bend the knee--Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen both voted to confirm Kristi Noem and they both voted to kill Dodd-Frank so that banks could profit over the common man. We have always accepted these two as useful but unreliable politicians.

John Fetterman has been a lost soul even before his stroke.

But Mad Dog expected better of Dick Durbin, Angus King and Thomas Kaine. These were men who attacked Trump boldly.

And now they vote to surrender.

Sometimes surrender is the right thing to do: The fanatics in the Japanese government, the die hards who wanted their fellow Japanese to fight on even after Japanese cities had been fired bombed and atomic bombed, even though the Japanese Navy was on the ocean bottom and the air force self destructing--those men were putting their own delusions ahead of their own people. (See "Embracing Defeat," John Dower.)

But our government shutdown was not Japan after the bomb.

It was beginning to hurt. It was beginning to become inconvenient. 

That's where you need courage.

There were two salient arguments for caving in to Trump and Thune and Michael Johnson:

1/ The people the shutdown hurt are mostly Democrats or people Democrats would like to keep in their fold: government workers, the poor, the hungry. Republicans do not consider these folks their constituents and are perfectly happy to see them suffer.

2/ The Democrats had no endgame: If the Republicans say, "Fine, we don't need no frigging guvment and we'll get paid for being Senators and Congressmen anyway and we can go home until the 2026 elections," then what do the Democrats have?

The answer to #1 is that we always hurt the ones we love, but we have to do that sometimes. Churchill did not say we'll fight them on the beaches thinking none of his constituents would be shot, and he did not inspect the bombed out London apartment buildings thinking his decisions had no part in that destruction. But he persevered because he knew what he was fighting for.

The answer to #2 is that neither side had an endgame, but the Republicans said, "We are willing to have no government," and the Democrats have to have the courage to say, "Fine, let's see how that plays out for you. We are willing to bet more Americans  will come to realize they need and even want a government than to not have one."

But what we did not know until these eight Democrats turned coward was whether we have strong enough leadership to justify having a Democratic party. 

And now we know.

CODA:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40kN6-yAbdA