Compassion or Cruelty; Flowers or Hammers
History often brings us an event that crystallizes an epoch. Political pundits speak of many themes that they perceive as fundamental to this critical November, 2022 election (democracy, women’s freedom, guns, climate change, inflation, crime, abortion etc.) and they are correct that they have percolated the media landscape and hence through many people’s minds. But the recent shocking assassination attempt of the Pelosi’s in San Francisco to me reveals an underlying essential dichotomy that is at stake in America now. Will the American people choose a culture of cruelty or of compassion? We will soon find out.
Democrats are championing four causes in this election (climate change, gun safety, women’s reproductive freedom and democracy itself) and all are in reaction to the cruelty that the Republican Party invests in their stand on these critical issues. Every Republican leader voted against the Inflation Reduction Act which contained a long overdue response to the danger of climate change. Instead, Republicans stoke the “alternative facts” of climate change denial (“It’s a Chinese hoax” said their cult leader) as they bow down to corporate leaders who seek short term profits over the cruelty inflicted on people, plants, and animals by our selfish insensitivity to how we are causing pain, death and extinction to current and future generations of living beings by not dealing adequately with the threat of climate change.
Republicans demagogue expertly about crime (but are strangely silent about the January 6th attacks on Capitol Police or on the Pelosi’s, inventing outlandish fact-free conspiracy theories instead) as they expertly kowtow to the gun lobby, flooding the American landscape with weapons of death and destruction which cause cruel deaths of innocent Americans every year. And speaking of demagoguery, the Republican Party has expertly stoked fears of sexual anxiety with their phony wars on LGBTQ literature and transgender people. Scoring political points and votes are worth far more to them than the cruelty they are inflicting in the culture on innocent adults and children who are simply trying to be who they are and instead receive psychological and physical harm from ignorant vicious people inspired by such hate-speak. And I would be remiss to fail to mention the Republican attacks on sick and old people who rely on Social Security and Medicare for their very existence: Republicans are cruelly putting those life-sustaining programs on their chopping block yet again.
The Republican Party wants to implement a national abortion ban and your vote for any Republican leader (including our own anti-choice Congressman Fitzpatrick) will help implement this cruelty to all American women who live now and who will be born in the future. In search of votes, they are willing to sacrifice their fetishistic commitment to Small Government and now champion Big Government to control the bodies, not of men, but only women in the most personal and intimate aspects of their lives. They will force children and women who are victims of rape and incest to carry to term their pregnancies inflicted on them by violence. Their misogynistic ideology champions a double cruelty on women in these cases: the rape as well as the psychological suffering of carrying a rapist’s baby. Cruelty abounds.
Democrats champion diversity of race, religion and sexual orientation, expanding health care for all at reasonable cost, protecting the old and sick, fighting for a living wage for all, defending reproductive freedom for all women, investing in a robust curriculum enriched public education for all, investing in childcare, and investing in and compassion for children in families in poverty. No cruelty here, unless you consider the hurt feelings of billionaires who might have to pay a few more cents in taxes on their astronomical wealth.
The final act of cruelty championed by the Republican Party is their assault on democracy itself. Their arrogance in willing to cruelly disenfranchise voters from a fundamental right in American democracy is astounding. They champion so many election deniers in so many elections, purge voters from the voter rolls, and make it more difficult to vote by limiting mail-in voting, drop boxes and polling stations. They intimidate voters at the polls with armed vigilantes who are allegedly “protecting the vote” and with law enforcement officials who arrest confused voters who may be ineligible to vote due to a long ago felony so as to make a Jim Crow like example to others to stay away from voting booths. The disdain for democracy reveals a cruelty to others in America who are being disenfranchised from the right of every American to participate in American political society and vote. Their desire to win at all costs trumps concern for the voting rights of those who may vote against them.They revel in their power and cruelty to the powerless. They even sacrifice the idea of democracy in their continual propagation of the Big Lie which threatens confidence in the foundations of democracy (free and fair elections and the peaceful transfer of power) because they know it opens the door to fascism and more delightful exercise of cruel power.
In the 1960s, America was also at a crossroads. The older generation championed a war in a faraway land based in great part on paranoid delusions of McCarthyite fears of Communist takeovers as well as the normal imperialist hubris and oligarchic and capitalist profiteering. But what was different this time was the very public medium of television that brought vivid scenes of the cruelty of war directly into the living rooms of American families. We saw napalm dropped on farmland and the burning flesh of innocent men, women and children was brought into our homes as a stark challenge to our moral sensibility. We saw our military engaged in massacres which held a ruthless mirror into our eyes. What the parents refused to see, the children saw with outraged moral clarity. The cruelty of war was not for the youth of America and they did not want that cruelty to be the defining essence of America either. The peace and love generation rose up and the culture of compassion and love arose from the anguish of the VietNam war. Scott McKenzie was one of many artists who developed music that reflected the new zeitgeist. In 1967 he recorded an anthem of compassion and love that captivated and defined the new generation:"San Francisco." His lyrics advise those coming to San Francisco to wear flowers in their hair.
But today the violent cult of MAGA Republicans inspired a follower to bring not flowers, but hammers to San Francisco so that the skulls of opposing leaders could be hammered into submission. So in this election, again we must make a fundamental choice between compassion and cruelty, between flowers and hammers. What will you choose? What will America choose? Soon we will know the answer to that question which was also posed in a way by another singer born of that era, Elton John:
“So where to now St. Peter
If it's true I'm in your hands
I may not be a Christian
But I've done all one man can
I understand I'm on the road
Where all that was is gone
So where to now St. Peter
Show me which road I'm on
Which road I'm on.”