Lament for Leadership [View all]

[TygrBright]

Almost up to the firing of the first artillery round at Fort Sumter, most of the "leaders" of the United States- politicians, newspaper publishers, business solons and even many mainstream church leaders- abrogated the moral imperative to dismiss the stain of human bondage from America's proud flag in pursuit of a futile effort to 'save the Union' through compromise with and appeasement of the slave states. While the belief that peacefully maintaining the Union was a nobler cause than ending slavery doubtless provided some comfort to their own deep-engrained but unacknowledged racism (read up on it, I dare you: "We don't want them slaves but we certainly don't want them here, slave or free," many Northerners freely acknowledged), none of these 'leaders' were capable of seeing beyond the immediate crisis they were trying so desperately to avert.

None of them, making soothingly rational arguments about negotiation and accommodation preserving peace and brotherhood among the states, could see the stark truth that a peace to preserve the ability of tyrants to continue their oppression unmolested, is no peace. None of them could see that rational arguments about the economic consequences of war and the horrors of bloodshed, merely cloaked the desire to continue their own comfortable existence without having to attend to the vast bleeding wounds of slavery.

These leaders, many of them old enough to have heard the first-hand tales from grandparents of the sacrifices to bring America into existence, some old enough to have fought themselves for America's survival in 1812, had decades of staring into the abyss of dissociation between the ideals of America's Declaration of Independence and the shameful Constitutional compromises that seemed necessary to create a Union to secure that Independence. It was the way things were.

Industrialization, expansion westward, and the booming economy fueled by waves of (mostly European) immigration that supplied low-cost labor to the North, created an insulating barrier of prosperity guarded by the conservative interests of banks and the growing power of Wall Street and other financial traders. At all costs, these leaders believed, it was necessary to preserve the fabric of trade, the structure of law and order as it stood.

And so, standing at the crossroads of history, they blocked effort after effort by those who clearly saw the inevitability entailed in the intransigence of the Southern holders of vast human "assets" to bring the 'peculiar institution' to an end and reorder the nation's future without the horrors of the block and the whip, the coffle and the manacles. They sold the nation's heritage of "Liberty and Justice for all" for a mess of cotton-trade pottage and their own continuance at the levers of power. Many, even most of them, honestly believed they were doing what was right for the nation and its future.

And so the beast slouched closer, and closer.

It was the younger people, a generation with less investment in the inertia of 'how things are', feeling stifled and cramped in the ever-narrowing pale created by the preservation of slavery, who stamped restlessly through the streets in the parades of the "Wide Awakes", supporting the stated anti-slavery agenda of the newborn Republican Party. It was the younger people who formed dozens of Northern militias, when the War Department had fewer than a hundred employees and most of America's standing peacetime Army (less than 20,000 all told) was deployed at western frontier forts.

How close! How close those leaders came, with their Crittendon Compromises and their seven-point Constitutional Amendments to enshrine slavery irrevocably in the fabric of America, to creating an ever-more-oppressive domestic tyranny on behalf of the slaveholders. How hard they worked, with their Old Gentlemens Convention, to keep America in the sewers of moral and economic degradation, all in the interests of moderation, cooler heads, experience, negotiation, gradualism and compromise.

Now we stand at another crossroads of history. A demented tyrant has sold our nation to a brutal adversary. His minions have been set free to loot and destroy America for their personal enrichment to further Putin's agenda of destroying the liberal West. Each day brings new victories for Russia and humiliations for this once-proud nation's ideals of freedom and equality.

And what, I ask, are our 'leaders' doing? Here in New Mexico we know better than most the price of fighting a Cold War against Russia. Are my Congressional delegation committed to standing up and shouting "NO!" to our domestic tyrant and his Russian master and his traitorous minions? Will they take a stand, and cease to give any countenance to the feeble chaotic machinations of a legislative body eviscerated by treason and supine indecision? Or will they tacitly assent to Putin's victory, and facilitate the subjection of free Americans under the name of domestic order and a feeble attempt to preserve peace and normalcy?

Then we need younger leaders. We need the clear-eyed vigor of America's next generation and their commitment to preserve the freedom of their children and our grandchildren. The leaders who sit in Washington telling themselves soothing fables about how such domestic storms have been weathered in the past, how disunity is always overcome by time and experience and prosperity preserved, need to stand aside or, at the last resort, be pushed aside.

Stand up! Let the tyrant speak to a half-empty chamber. Give him no countenance, no toleration, no latitude. No pious fictions about 'decorum' and 'tradition'. Rise and lead!

I would have that chamber half-empty. Or have half of the chamber draped in the blue and gold of those fighting the Russian tyrant for their own freedom, the allies we have shamefully betrayed and deserted to serve the purses of our own traitors and the triumph of our age-old foreign adversary. You stand at the crossroads of history, and history will record whether your names will be listed with Buchanan and Crittendon and Jefferson Davis, or with John Brown and Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant. Rise and lead!

passionately,
Bright