A
Leap Of Faith
We all know what's said in a bruising political campaign often
overstates, overreaches, and just plain isn't true. We've
all heard plenty of that in recent months, and in choosing
how you'll vote for president next Tuesday, we hope people
will set aside much of what they've heard and instead look
within themselves for direction, much as we would with anything
we do that really matters. This choice, this vote, it does
really matter.
Our country has been through a very difficult four years.
The economy went into a tailspin when our president took office,
and he spent most of 2001 on vacation while his staff went
to war on 3 fronts: fighting for tax cuts for the wealthy,
giving away our public lands and dismantling regulatory protection
for the environment, and launching a multi-pronged assault
on Thomas Jefferson's 220 year-old wall between church and
state at the behest of the religious right.
Then 9-11 happened. In its wake the president could have asked
almost any sacrifice of us and, united behind him, we'd have
backed it. Instead what he asked for was more tax cuts for
people who don't need them and a war against a country that
vicious as its leadership was, hadn't attacked us and didn't
have the means to try, though it does have, after the Saudis,
the world's largest proven oil reserves. Our military
performed brilliantly but we never sent enough of them to
establish civil authority or keep the peace, and every day,
more of our young Americans in uniform pay the ultimate price
for that. Meanwhile because of the reckless fiscal policy
we've maintained, we've failed to protect social security,
failed to fund education adequately, screwed up the Medicare
drug bill, and worst of all, we've utterly, totally failed
at the most important security issue we face: controlling
nuclear proliferation and keeping the former Soviet arsenal
out of terrorist hands. Russia's President Putin begged for
our help with this and we blew him off. In fact our whole
foreign policy these past four years has sent an unmistakable
message to Iran and North Korea and some of the 20 other nuclear-capable
nations in the world: If you don't want to be pre-emptively
taken out by the United States, better get those weapons up
and running fast. All this of course, is water under
the bridge now, but only if we choose to let it continue.
We may of course, vote to do just that, assuming we buy the
idea that these kinds of choices somehow constitute the best
possible protection from the threat of international terrorism.
We don't believe they do. We think they've contributed to
global instability and made our country less safe rather than
more safe from the people who hate us more than they love
life, and are happy to die to prove it.
No one has the answers to the threat of nuclear, chemical,
or biological terrorism and no president can make our justifiable
fears go away. We didn't choose this war but we will in choosing
a president, choose how we'll fight it from this point on.
Our best hope for survival is our God-given intelligence and
the wisdom we glean from it. As Americans, our constitution,
our personal and civil rights, these are our greatest treasures,
the things that make us a nation worth living in and worth
dying for. As much as our personal safety, these are the things
that 9-11 and its aftermath have shown us are at risk now.
They are, unmistakably, at risk and not from outside our nation
but from within it. Because we all understand that revolutions
aren't made in the streets these days, they're made in the
courts.
And our federal courts you may have noticed, are fast becoming
The Inquisition. And when the wall between church and state
is gone and our foreign policy is The Crusades and our domestic
policy is the end of Jeffersonian democracy and the government
in your bedroom and your hard drive, then together, Al Qaeda
and our own government will have killed the America we've
always known and it will stay dead, perhaps forever.
Fundamentalism, anybody's fundamentalism, is the inability
to deal with complexity, and the world is damn complex. But
we think a president shouldn't take us to war under false
pretenses. We think his primary obligation should be to public
health, not to drug company stockholders. We think forty years
of environmental protection shouldn't be trashed overnight,
and the cure to disease or the choice to bring a child into
the world shouldn't be held hostage to anyone's religious
philosophy.
We choose next Tuesday between two men, one who's barely managed
to slide through at whatever he's done and one who's always
excelled, one who's ducked responsibility all his life and
one who's unhesitatingly taken it on. We choose between two
men of faith but only one a missionary. Our position is people
should vote for the more capable leader of the two, whichever
their heart tells them that really is. Sure it's a leap
of faith, but what worth trying, isn't?
