[Newspoetry] Quintessential Democrats

[emerick at chorus.net]

Dear Mr. Brooks,

Thank you for your column, today, in the New York Times,on-line, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/20/opinion/20BROO.html?th.

While I am not a female, nor do I teach public school, your profile of Democrats like me is quite perceptive.

You could have added, as if paraphrasing Dick Gephardt, that this person has ties to blue collar working class families, because he/she grew up in a blue collar home.  You could add that this person has little significant aspiration for wealth, though she/he is usually comfortable materially and sees him/herself as just "scraping by", in raising his/her own family, as best as she/he can.

You could add that empathy for those less fortunate is thus a personal recollection and a continuing experience, through family and friends and acquaintancesips that extend back many years.  These childhood friends and classmates have been sometimes less successful in school and too often turned too early into the workforce as farmers, clerks, and factory employees.  These are friends and classmates who have seen their farms fail, their stores close, their factories fold.

Acquisitions, mergers, and relocations of corporations from distant elsewheres have caused our workplaces to disappear, our standards of living to diminish.  Our owners have become ever more distant from us -- absentee landlords who care nothing for our land or those of us who live in it, upon it and off of it, for those landlords over the horizon no longer see and sense the human consequences of their ever more distant decisions.  In their ever more distanced views of living beings, only the calculating drives of money towards its own self-rewarding returns could possibly matter to them.

Their culture pretends to be one of just merits, responsive to the vested interests that seek ever higher returns on money and wealth that they alone own.  Their idea of merit doubles over our backs, as useful service to those most driven by an ever most instantaneous and fluid money, an ever more solidified plutocracy of consolidated and incorporated wealth.  We might dream their merits to be worthy, were their merits those of ideal aristocracy or pilosopher kings.

However, in fact, their merit speaks to none of those most quintessential Christian virtues of charity toward all, malice toward none.  For, among other things, the quintessential Democrat is as religious as Lincoln, perhaps, in his modern -- if not also post-modern -- sort of way: God may not be out there, if he is not in us.

The quintessential Democrat does not sort-sightedly qualify his or her altruism of caring for the world.  The world is something that he/she does not own and does not want to own, for good religious people aim most to be like good stewards.  Good religious people reject the thumping of other people, as much as they reject the thumping of holy books like the Bible.  Good religious people fear the foolishness of bad religious people, who ever seem to be thinking most of how to force their own foolish religion upon unwilling others.

Quintessential democrats thus reject the self-righteousness of the relgiously monopolistic so-called Christian right wing.  Quintessential democrats are not deluded by such oxymoronic, self-contradictory catch phrases as "compassionate conservativism" -- for they see no conservatism proper to a steward and no compassion, no mercy, no charity that is worthy of us, as persons and as a people.

We do not let ourselves be entertainingly filled by vain-glorious dreams of childish triumphs like "manned" missions to Mars, as we desire to further the noble dignity of simple human life.  When we want to over reach, we do not think of ourselves as greedy.  Rather, we think of our own over reaching as an overcoming of hurtful challenges to our well being, personally and societally, challenges that arise because of and despite our limitations of self and resources.

We thus want to think and to do those things that might, when added together through others in the common causes of our local community, make enough of a difference to have made this time of our lives meaningful.

At the bottom line, while we can't live beyond the circles of our own lives, we at least want to see that those closest to us -- as family and friends and neighbors -- do not fall into any conditions of suffering that our own less-selfish acts could and should have helped them reduce, avoid or escape.

Thank you again, then, for speaking and prompting these remindings into my self-awareness.

Sincerely,
Donald L Emerick