We should lead by the power of example

To The Eagle:

I’d like to address some of the derogatory comments made by the fellow who mocked our country as having “adopted self-excoriation as a national pastime.”

National retrospection is not a weakness, regardless of what Republican reactionaries or the Chinese communists might think.

Recognizing our nation’s past errors, expressing our “mea culpas” and acting to correct those mistakes on behalf of those affected by them, is not excoriation. It’s the progressive development of our national conscience. It’s the honing of our foundational ideals.

Let’s put a few of that author’s other acrimonious judgements into context.

Abortion has never been unlimited. The vile claim that it’s “celebrated” is disgusting. The right to discuss that agonizing personal choice belongs only to the woman contemplating it. Moralize self- righteously to your heart’s content. It remains none of your business.

We have many “revered monuments” on display, but statuary glorifying treasonous generals, who sent conscripted troops to their deaths in a seditious rebellion to preserve slavery, should be toppled by the descendants of those slaves and hammered into marble shards.

We would have been spared today’s tortured race relations if Jim Crow hadn’t denied four million freed slaves their “forty acres and a mule” promised by General Grant as reparations. That debt has accrued 150 years of compounded interest and is long past due. Justice delayed is justice denied.

His acclamation that “Trump was too strong a leader for the weak hearted among us,” is a testament of that writer’s fascist yearnings. Such a desperate desire to be led by a “strongman” has put dictators, demagogues and mass murderers into power throughout history.

Better that the nation embrace President Biden’s philosophy that “we should lead, not by the example of our power, but by the power of our example.”

JB Bouchard

Puget Island