Crossing the Lines

Written by: rich^kolker on Jul 6, 2006 2:33 PM EDT

"THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."

I quote Paine because quoting Sorkin's "American President" might be considered shallow, if just as apropos, "We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious men to solve them."

The most serious of those problems isn't Iraq, isn't terrorism, isn't the cost of gasoline or the supply of oil or education or jobs; the most serious of those problems is that the United States is in danger of losing its Unity. We are all in danger of losing something that existed even before we were a nation, before 1776 and which that Declaration only reflected, our identity as Americans.

This is not to say we have not faced division before: Federalists and Republicans, Jacksonians and Whigs, the North and South, native and immigrant, white and black. But each of those divisions were underlaid with a common sense of America even as they fought over their uncommonalities. That is missing today.

The other side is no longer the opposition, it has become the enemy. The concept of a "loyal opposition" is gone, you are either loyal, or you are anti-American, and that goes whether you look from the right, or from the left, or even within the Democratic Party where DLC battles liberal base. The goal in elections is no longer to defeat your opponent, it is to destroy him. There is no faith in the system, the Constitution which has guided us, the world's most successful revolutionary democratic republic, for over 200 years.

Where is the person who can speak across these boundaries as Robert Kennedy once did? What can that person say?

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