By Edwin Cooney
Okay, before getting started, I'd better straighten out the mess I've caused already. To my friend in extreme northwest Pennsylvania, I understand that you don't believe you have a soul — as for your patience, that's, of course, conditional! To another very fine friend of mine in extreme southwest Michigan who is not only sure he possesses a soul but relies on it, I wonder when his soul is going to kick in to protest the values of a president whose morals are clearly on a par of the president he once insisted ought to be impeached on moral grounds if nothing else. As for what I mean by "times," I understand that times can either be limitless or definable from a specific historic occasion.
About 1776, an extremely disgruntled Scotsman named Thomas Paine, who had just recently emigrated to the colonies, began the first volume of a series of pamphlets on "The American Crisis" with the following assertion: "These are the times that try men's souls."
Of course, today that first statement, rather than immortalizing him, would have landed him on a talk show on which he'd be roasted probably by the newly elected “Squad" of angry Democratic congresswomen. Be that as it may, Thomas Paine's observations were such as to create a generation of men we have called, since the days of President Warren Harding, our "Founding Fathers."
However outrageous and immoral the British government under George the Third and Lord North may have been, the sins of both Presidents Clinton and Trump would pale in comparison to the sins of those mighty British personages. Somehow "taxation without representation” (to which the British population itself was also a victim at the time) was never meant to be a slight aimed at the liberties of the colonies. Today, presidents encourage such legislation including enhancing criminal laws for the sake of the politically powerful rather than for the sake of either liberty or justice (circa the late 1990s), manipulating the country into a war for a reason that didn't exist (circa 2003), and slurring the values and worthiness of people based on their ethnicity and religious faith (2018).
The truth is that in order for anything to be sinful it must be recognized as such by you and me.
Today we live in an age that forces into our awareness attitudes and events that are invariably overlapping in their cause and effect. At one time, it could be said that, for the most part, difficult issues generally land on the desk of the President of the United States and nowhere else. Under traditional national expectations, that has been true. However, "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” is very different.
Our national fate clearly challenges us to discern fact from what President Woodrow Wilson once called "political make believe.” (That’s good advice although President Wilson didn't always practice it, such as when, in the fall of 1918, he urged the election of Democrats as the only way we could win World War I!) That bit of partisanship cost President Wilson when he lost his dream of America leading a successful League of Nations to a GOP-led Senate in 1919.
These are indeed the times that try all our souls and our patience. Some of our national confusion is legitimate and some of it is self-created. Painful as it is sometimes to draw vital distinctions between right and wrong or true and false, that’s the precise task we’ve assigned ourselves.
In 2020, it’s my turn and your turn to be Tom Paine.
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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