Working the plough or wielding the sword

      Working the plough or wielding the sword

      Politics, in our country, has become a blood sport, a series of “Tong wars," perpetrated with a “for us and agin’ us" mentality, that seeks political retribution as an end product. Much of the political cadre are guilty as charged, regardless of the loud protestation of "who me" from an otherwise angelic countenance.

      In my earlier years, I too enjoyed the sport with gusto, as a series of sieges, attacks and counter attacks that kept the boys in a merry spirit. There was always an "enemy" to rally the troops around and an opponent’s castle to lay siege to.

      When the country was healthier fiscally, the voting public could look on amused, as the various bog warriors had at each other with verbal mace and bludgeon. The issue mattered not much as long as the opposition was bloodied sufficiently to slake the ire of the combatants. And all around the battleground, the castles were falling down around everyone’s ears.

       The mindset is Hobbsian, the intent Machiavellian. It is a narcissistic rationale that figures “they” (elected official) are the font of all goodness for the community. Any perceived threat to their tenure is an assault on the common weal. “Collateral damage” to innocent civilians is never even part of the equation in the narrow perceptive configuration of the combatants. I don’t think anyone ever means real damage to “civilians,” they just never even think beyond the intended damage to a defined and offending target. It is an egocentric mentality that anyone who deals in the trade easily recognizes

      Today, government costs are steadily rising, generating large tax increases and employee layoffs that pour gasoline on an already raging economic fire. Medicaid, health care and retirement costs are fueling a downward spiral that makes even an optimist think about burying some pennies in the back yard for a rainy day. And still, the withering political cross fire here, and in our nation’s capital, continues.

      The media also shoulders some responsibility for the continuing circus. Television cameras and reporter’s pencils focus first on the argument and only afterwards on the issue as background material for the brawl. The amount of crepe and sensationalism, featured in a typical week, would do justice to a funeral peroration for Julius Caesar or God’s nephew.

     I think we need to reconfigure the rules of political congress in our country. Oh, you are never going to stop the hard-core knuckleheads. They don’t know any other way and won’t change, regardless of who asks them to cease and desist. But, I do see hope and promise in some of the younger men and women that we now elect to public office. With a little encouragement from friends and peers, they just might put down their pikes and put shoulders to the wheel, with people of differing philosophies, to work towards solutions that might benefit the area as a whole. There is an axiom in politics, that posits "you can get anything that you wish accomplished, as long as you don’t need to take credit for it."  I have found it true enough over the years. You can disagree with anyone’s point of view, however passionately, yet respect their right to say what they do and treat them with dignity and respect in the process.

     Our friends, neighbors and family deserve better than our elected leaders have been giving them. More importantly, they desperately need more than they are getting. So, I suggest that we collectively urge those whom we know, in the "grand game of politics," to lay down the battle-axes and take up the plough. There is work enough to be done everywhere, if we are to reap any but a bitter harvest in the future.

                                             -30-

                                        (624 words)

                                 Joseph Xavier Martin