| When people draw political illustrations
from Shakespeare, they usually go to Macbeth, Hamlet, or
perhaps Richard III. In this election season, though, I find myself
drawn instead to a line from Romeo and Juliet:
"A plague on both your houses!"
On the left, we have a recent ad, run by the NAACP,
in which the daughter of James Byrd describes her father's brutal murder
and says that, when Gov. Bush didn't support a piece of hate crimes legislation,
it was like her father being murdered all over again.
The fact is that, whatever position you might take
on hate crimes legislation, it is patently absurd to suggest that opposing
it is akin to murder, particularly when the murderers in question have
been convicted of the murder and face the most severe penalties available
under the law.
On the right, we have an ad run by Don Stenberg,
the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from Nebraska, in his campaign
against Democratic candidate Ben Nelson. In this ad, Stenberg claims that
Nelson supports higher taxes because property taxes rose while Nelson was
governor.
The only problem is that, in Nebraska, property taxes
are levied at the local level, not the state level. The governor and the
Legislature cannot raise them, and they can't lower them.
These are only two examples of a growing tendency
of politicians to tell half-truths, distortions, and on occasion, outright
lies. They are getting away with it, too. Instead of being held accountable
for their actions, either we listen to them and believe them, or we simply
become cynical and withdraw from the whole process.
In the movie, A Few Good Men, the lawyer,
portrayed by Tom Cruise, has a heated confrontation with a Marine colonel,
played by Jack Nicholson. When the lawyer demands, "I want the truth!",
the colonel barks back, "You can't handle the truth!" I sometimes wonder
if that's how the politicians see us. Either we can't handle the truth
or we're too stupid to know we aren't getting it.
Maybe we need to be more like the lawyer, and we
need to demand that our politicians give us the truth. We need to do our
homework so that we know whether or not they're giving it to us, and if
they won't we need to turn our support to others who will.
It's not enough for our politicians to vote like
we want them to. They also need to be honest with us. They owe it to us,
and we owe it to ourselves to demand it from them. After all, a plague
on both their houses is a plague on our houses, too. |
