People have to make painful decisions all the time. And, nations have to do the same sort of thing.

Right now, in the nation of Somalia, in Africa, women are watching as their children are dying a slow death, and, sometimes not so slow, from a debilitating drought that has gripped the nation for months. A CNN reporter asked an aid worker involved with this disaster what triggers the declaration of a drought. She replied that it didn’t really matter because people were starving and people were dying each and every hour of each and every day. A drought declaration is only a reflection of what has already come to pass. There was an interview with a woman from Somalia who had birthed twins and had already seen the little girl pass away from the affects of the drought. As we looked at her, we wondered if she had chosen between the two children and had, perhaps, favored the stronger one over the other in hopes that one of them might survive. As the interview took place, the camera panned over a dead camel lying in the sand.

In 1982, Meryl Streep starred in a film that won her an academy award as she played a Polish woman who had been assigned to Auschwitz along with her two children. While there, she was given the task of deciding which of her two children would survive and which of them would be sent to the gas chamber. She chose that the little boy would live and that the little girl would die in Crematorium number two. In the end, and many years later, she ended up committing suicide by taking cyanide with her lover as they could no longer live with the terrible decision that she had been ultimately forced to make. One might think that it might be a stretch to equate the story of Sophie with the situation that currently exists in this nation today with the debt ceiling rapidly approaching on August second of this year. But, as we look into the eyes of people like Michele Bachmann, we see the same look that we saw in the eyes of the SS officer as he confronted Sophie with her choice. There is a great pride among those of the tea party and others in the Republican party as they drive this nation toward the end of its existence as a leader of the free world and a safe haven where investors around this world can place their funds confident that this fine old democracy and all that it has stood for over the years might always weather the economic storms that have come so often across the horizon of this world.

President Bill Clinton has reminded us and set the pace when he has said that not paying this nations just obligations is simply telling the world that we no longer care not only about our own house, but anyone else’s place of refuge just as well. We discussed at length last Sunday that we are sure that the Republican party has become nothing more than a mindless cult revolving around invisible personalities and ideas that have no more validity in life that the fact that the cow cannot jump over the moon. To think that this nation can never raise taxes ever again is not to think at all and that is exactly what the Republicans are doing--not thinking at all. The tea party is the end result and nightmare that has come about because this nation has become so polarized since the Bush-Gore campaign of 2000 that it can no longer effectively govern itself. This is what happened to Germany after the First World War that resulted in the rise of Hitler and his cult that led to good and decent people like the Sophie of Sophie’s Choice being given the decisions that they were given in so many numbers.

It does not matter whether we pay the interest on our debts to the exclusion of so many who rely on the government for their livings and their very survival. It is a Sophie’s Choice that is going to result in great pain and many passages for those who are innocent and helpless to do anything else about it. The American people do not want any more debt, but, do they want the consequences of what will inevitable come if that road is not followed? Perhaps the choice that the Republicans are trying to force us into might come eventually anyway, but, to say that it must occur on August second, 2011 is a true Sophie’s Choice if we ever saw one. To say that the tea party hates Barack Obama with a vengeance that is beyond comprehension is simply a reflection of what they really, really, are. A group of narrow minded and bigoted racists that are just as bad in their way as anything that the Aryan movement that Hitler sponsored back in the thirties or forties might ever have been.

And so, come august second we will more than likely, as a nation that is now divided into warring factions, be forced into Sophie’s Choices of our own that no one would have ever contemplated that might ever come this nations way. Good and decent and innocent people will be forced to make choices of their own as they are already living out on the edge and cannot really stand anything more that might come their way. The old who depend on Social Security and Medicare may face rationing of services and doctors may be faced with the prospect of deciding who might be allowed to live and who might be allowed to die. A choice that is no less devastating to them than the one Sophie had to make about her two children. The old and the vulnerable watch the news and they are frightened to near death right now by the choices that may so soon be forced upon them. They never had much except a willingness to work at the lowest end of the economic scale and they never asked for anything other than what many would describe as the barest of existences. They have had no say as administration after administration of Republican presidencies and congresses ran up trillion after trillion of debt that has taken away their meager stake in this bitter passion play. It would be one thing if these deficits had been run up by democratic liberals who have always championed and watched out for them. However, seventy five percent of these deficits have been accumulated, by design, by republicans bent on destroying a way of life for so many who have given so much and have asked for so little back in return.

We really don’t think that anything that we might do at this late date, even if we do manage to pass a debt ceiling extension, will repair some of the lasting damage that has been done by this exercise that the Congress and the president have lately been forced into by zealots out of a cult that has no actually thinking and comprehending mind of its own. And, the American people, in November of 2012, will have a choice to make that is all their own. It is a choice that was presented to Indiana Jones in another film where, after making a leap of faith, was confronted with the choice of which cup among the many and the proud that might have been drunken from by Jesus Christ himself. With his dying fathers life on the line, Jones overlooked the great gold and emerald encrusted cups placed before him and chose a simple wooden cup that a humble carpenters son might have used. It was the correct choice and there is a way out of this mess that we find ourselves in. It’s answer lies in a dose of humbleness by everyone that is thus involved. However, we wonder if those on the right have any conception of what that might be. They are playing the role of those on a seat of judgment that is not in any way their right to assume. And, the one who does set in judgment will sooner of later in his own good way and his own good time, have the final say. And then there will be another choice made as those who were good and humble and innocent take their rightful seats in eternity and those who sat in judgment take another and far more rocky road to what awaits them in the bowls of eternity.

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe

To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.