Spitting on their graves

When I think about all of the women who marched and protested for women's rights, who were beaten and shunned and mocked . . .

When I think about all of the brave leaders of the labor movement, who pressed forward despite broken kneecaps and bludgeoned heads and assassinations and other violence from the bully-boys hired by management to keep them down as they struggled for workers' protections and decent pay and a reasonable work week and heath care . . .

When I think of all the women and girls who died or were maimed in back alley abortions, and all of the brave women who even now have to force their way through racketeering mobs to make their own reproductive choices . . .

When I think of all the confused young American kids fed to the German machine guns to prevent the spread of fascism . . .

When I think of all the people who braved lynchings and beatings and fire hoses and dogs to try to win equality under the law for people of all races . . .

When I think of the brave journalists who stood up to the Pentagon and the President and huge, well-connected corporations to expose the truth, despite death threats and firings, to maintain the importance of freedom of the press . . .

When I think of all the people who have taken to the streets, despite tear gas and billy clubs and horses and riot gear and domestic surveillance, to maintain the freedom of assembly and to send messages to their leaders with an urgency that emails and letters will never have . . .

When I think about all of these people, toiling, sweating, worrying, fighting, dying, the lost lives, the shed blood, the tears, the despair, and finally the triumphs in all they have done to make our lives, collectively, better . . .

AND THEN I THINK about the way the Democratic leadership, with its mumbling, bumbling, fumbling, stumbling, bloviating, clueless and feckless non-leadership is just going to lay down and let the modern day fascists roll right over them and take it all away, I just cannot stand it. Biden acts like the most important thing about the Alito hearings is the sound of his own voice and how much air time he gets. DOESN'T HE UNDERSTAND what is at stake here?

Doesn't the Democratic leadership understand that they are spitting on their graves, all of those people, who suffered to achieve a little balance between the haves and have nots, between the oppressed and the oppressors, between the rich and the poor?

What will it take to wake them up? We cannot just capitulate and let them fall from their own incompetence, as they so richly deserve, because we will all fall with them. Yet, when we prop them up, all they can muster is more of the same foolishness, lack of focus, lack of a sense of what is important.

There is a conversation in Washington going on now, between the ruthlessly evil and the hopelessly mediocre. And all we can do is watch in horror as the whole lot of them spit on the graves of our benefactors.