Profiles in Courage

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good [people] to do nothing." (Edmund Burke)

Yesterday, Admiral William McRaven called out the President of the United States in an op-ed piece in The Washington Post. By all accounts, Admiral McRaven is not a partisan person. Just the opposite. It took a line being crossed in taking away John Brennan's security clearance for him to speak up about what he called "McCarthy-era tactics to suppress the voices of criticism."

In other news yesterday, across this nation there were editorials in about 350 newspapers insisting that a free press is not the enemy of the people. Of course it isn't! The fact that this needs to be said is a testimony to the moral failings of this President. Newspapers get it wrong sometimes, but journalism is an honorable vocation and I am with Thomas Jefferson, who said "were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

There have been other critics of this President, on both sides of the aisle, including (early on) both the former Governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, and American hero, Senator John McCain. But there need to be even more who are willing to stand up to this bully in the White House.

I have tried to be one of those, writing here and elsewhere since the first Republican presidential debate about what I have seen as serious danger to what John Meacham has called "the soul of America." I recently became aware that I've lost over a dozen Facebook friends in the past eighteen months. I don't usually check such things, but I realized that I am no longer "friends" with those who have "un-friended me" for what I can only guess is about expressing my concerns about this great nation and where we are headed. This makes me more sad than angry.

I have always had political opinions. I went to Georgetown University in 1981 during the first year of  Ronald Reagan's first term in Washington and during my years there as an undergraduate I had a chance to work for my (Republican) Congressman on Capitol Hill. I've never been bashful about sharing my (mostly) progressive opinions. But I have been equally committed, I believe, to listening to others. I like the debate. I like informed debate.

I had a chance to meet the late Senator George McGovern once and then hear him debate the late William F. Buckley, Jr. on stage at Central Connecticut State University, where I was serving as the Protestant Campus Minister. I was like a kid in a candy shop! That day, Senator McGovern shared that when he was in the Senate, his best friend was Barry Goldwater. They agreed on almost nothing politically. But at the end of a long day, they'd have a beer together and talk about their families and find the common ground they did share as Americans. And, as I remember it all these years later, he said that in spite of their political differences, they knew much more united than divided them.

In one sense that sounds quaint and even nostalgic. Yet I can imagine that kind of conversation even today if Governor Romney or Senator McCain or Governor John Kasich stopped by my house. (I'm less and less sure about the spineless Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan.) I'd invite them in without a second thought and offer them a hoppy IPA and revel in the conversation. I know that I would do this because I have, my whole life, done the same with my Republican friends who agree with them on matters of policy and vote for them consistently - in spite of my best efforts to persuade them to vote otherwise.

I know that none of us possess all the truth. I believe we discover the truth (or something closer to it) by both passionately expressing what we believe, and by listening to what others passionately believe.

But this moment in our history is not about that. This is not about policy differences between people of good faith. This is about a small vindictive sexist racist man bent on silencing all who disagree with him. A man who spreads fear and lies as weapons toward creating, not a more perfect union, but a more fascist state. Adjectives like "Nixonian" and "McCarthy-era tactics" give even Nixon and McCarthy a bad name. We are living in very dangerous times, and the soul of America is at stake.

And I will not be silent.