Today, I am ashamed to be a Democrat.
The leader of my party has decided to capitulate to ideological terrorists, giving into their demands to take my country away from me.
Today, I am ashamed to be a Democrat.
The poor, the unhealthy, those least able to survive the economic downturn we're in have had a little more of their safety net taken away. The safety net we, as a nation, believed was important to meeting our obligation to the less fortunate among us.
Today, I am ashamed to be a Democrat.
At a time when our economy could use economic help, the kind of a help a government is meant to provide on behalf of all of us, my party has agreed to side with those who believe that austerity is the solution to all economic ills.
Today, I am ashamed to be a Democrat.
The wealthiest two percent--the "job creators", in the parlance of the hostage-takers--can safely continue to acquire more of the nations' wealth, free from any obligation to pay us back for what we, as taxpayers and builders of the nation's infrastructure, have enabled them to achieve.
Today, I am ashamed to be a Democrat.
The representatives we have worked to elect, who told us that things would change, that they would fight for the dispossessed, that change was coming, have now told us that they "could do no better" than to mortgage our future to appease a far-right, fringe element of the other side.
Today, I am ashamed to be a Democrat.
The leader of the other party, a man unable to say "No" to the most fringe elements of his own party, a man who by all rights should have lost his position over what appeared to be the coming debacle, emerges stronger and more in control than before.
Today, I am ashamed to be a Democrat.
Those ideological terrorists--men and women who believe that the free market is the root of all that is good, and who believe that government is the root of all problems--will be emboldened by this victory, and will move to take a new set of hostages to achieve their demands. And this could have been prevented if a few members of my party had taken a principled stand--had decided to say "Here, and no further".
Today, I am ashamed to be a Democrat.
In the coming days, I must make some hard decisions. Decisions about where to put the money I dedicate to political change. Decisions about who to vote for and who to work hard against. Decisions about what to do now that my country has shown the direction it intends to pursue, even when leaders who claim to hold my principles are in charge.
But for today, I am ashamed to be a Democrat.
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A postscript:
I was remembering the line from a Yeats poem, "the centre cannot hold" as a description of where we are today.
Turns out, the entire poem is relevant, I think.
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?