Yes, Republicans in Congress are people too. They do care about people. And they will do something magnanimous on occasion. At least, when they can identify with one of their own who has suffered a great loss in his or her own life:
Had things turned out differently, Caroline Pryce Walker would have graduated from high school this month.
Instead, her mother, Rep. Deborah Pryce, stood on the House floor Wednesday evening and introduced a bill in Caroline’s name that would boost research funding for pediatric cancer — the kind that killed Caroline nine years ago.
“This is our graduation gift to her,” said Pryce, an Ohio Republican, choking back tears. She is retiring in December after 16 years in Congress, choosing to care for her daughter Mia, whom she adopted in 2002, three years after Caroline’s death.
The vote on Caroline’s bill passed 416-0. That means all the Republicans who voted, voted in favor of it. And yes, some will ask, why didn’t it pass earlier, when the Republicans held control of the House and Senate? And aren’t many of these votes, by both Democrats and Republicans politically motivated? And isn’t the amount of the funding for research on pediatric cancer, $30 million, a year for five years ($150 million totals) just a drop in the bucket, especially compared to the billions we waste every month in Iraq? Good questions, but not the ones I want to focus on at present.
You see, all of us care more about an issue when it hits close to home. My wife has had cancer, My sister has been raped. I’ve been the victim of a brutal criminal assault. I have had friends with mental illness attempt suicide, and watched as teenage children I cared about did not receive adequate care for the emotional and physical damage that had been done to them. I have witnessed my own children be tarred with racial slurs that the people making them didn’t even realize were damning. So I have my issues that I care about deeply because of the suffering that I, my friends and family have gone through. As do many of you, I’m sure. And I’m grateful for Rep. Deborah Pryce that she took the effort to get this bill passed. I know it meant a lot to her, and I’m sure it meant a lot to her friends in Congress on both sides of the aisle.
We forget that in our age of politics where the venom flows so freely 24 hours a day on radio, television and the internet, where each side demonizes the other, slanders and questions the other, uses smear tactics and lies, that beneath all this are a few people who are indeed motivated by service to their country, as they see it. And, yes, I do blame the actions of the Republican party and its operatives primarily for the nasty cast and the ugly tone of our political discourse. From the time of McCarthy through Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, Atwater, Gingrich, Rove, the Bushes and all the many players in the supporting cast of the Conservative Movement, major and minor, we have seen our politics become one big festival of fear and hate, smears and lies, attack ads and mudslinging to a degree perhaps unparalleled in our history. Indeed, this year we saw how ugly that discourse has become within the Democratic party during the primary battles between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, candidates who differed only slightly on substantive issues, but represented radically different constituencies. So nasty, that some supporters of the losing candidate actually favor supporting the ultra conservative John McCain in the general election, a man who stands against almost everything Hillary Clinton advocated in her speeches this campaign season.
So this is a disease of our body politic that now permeates our perceptions of each other, constantly pitting one group against another, constantly pouring out messages of anger and fear and distrust at those who differ from us in any way whatsoever. Black v. White, Men v. Women, Latinos v. Nativists, Gays v. Straights, Liberals v. Conservatives, Christians v. Atheists, Scientists v. any group (Fundamentalist Christians to Big Business) who don’t like the what science has to tell us about reality.
It is a disease that has infected our media, too. We, who once prided ourselves on the independence of our newspapers and network news organizations have seen them devolve into mere stenographers, rumor mongers, spin doctors and talking pointy heads screaming at each other as if a debate can be won by the person who shouts the loudest or demeans his adversary the most, overseen by cable news hosts who seem more interested in the game of politics than the reality of how it impacts the lives of everyone who doesn’t reside in the Washington Beltway Bubble.
Indeed, of all the laurels I saw heaped on the still warm body of Tim Russert this past week, the one that I found most absurd and degrading (though it clearly was not intended as such) was the comment from Tom Brokaw on how Russert didn’t care about the substance of political issues so much as he enjoyed “The Game” of political infighting for power and electoral success. He loved The Game? As if that was an accolade worthy of being touted as one of the highest achievements by this supposed master practitioner of television journalism. A man who confessed on the witness stand that he considered all conversations with his contacts in government to be “off the record” whether they asked him to do so or not. It is a measure of how far so many of the men and women who work for our news gathering organizations have fallen that Tim Russert, the master spreader of right wing talking points and coddler of Republican politicians, could be viewed as a pillar of journalistic excellence.
So, I applaud Deborah Pryce for this one small effort to do something for those children who are afflicted by pediatric cancer. I understand that she suffered a great loss when her daughter succumbed at such an early age to such a horrid illness. I only wish there was a way to make more Republicans and more Democrats feel this same measure of compassion and concern for people who they do not know, who suffer from conditions of disease, poverty, oppression and war, but whose suffering goes unnoticed by these very same politicians and who have no advocate for their causes.
I wish more Republicans had had the courage and the empathy to buck their party when they voted to override President Bush’s veto of the bill to expand the SCHIP program which funds health insurance for children whose families cannot afford it, rather than allowing their surrogates in the right wing media to vilely attack some of the very children who benefit from it. I wish more Republicans and Democrats, both, had stood up to President Bush when he demanded and received authorization for his demented and delusional invasion and occupation of Iraq, a war that has cost our military service people and the Iraqi people more in death and ruined human lives than any amount of wasted dollars we have paid to corrupt contractors and corrupt Iraqi politicians could account for. I wish the politicians had cared enough about the victims of Hurricane Katrina to provide real relief to those who suffered the most from the upheaval it caused, rather than fund boondoggles for well connected businesses who contributed to the Republican party coffers. I wish the priorities of our political class were not focused strictly of institutional goals of obtaining power and the benefits that flow from control of the government, but on actual service to their constituents.
So, thank you Deborah Pryce, even though your political views are not mine, and even though you have likely voted against many of the programs that I believe would have done much to alleviate or prevent the suffering that so many of our fellow Americans our enduring today. You accomplished one thing that will help children and their families who are now, or may in the future, confront the tragedy of childhood cancers. I only wish that it hadn’t taken the loss of your own daughter to make this a cause near and dear to your heart, nor that leaving Congress now after 16 years in the House motivated your colleagues to give you this bill as a going away present. For how much more could we as a people, and you and your fellow Congressional members who represent us, accomplish if we could spread a wider net of compassion to all those who need our help instead of limiting our concern for those who have experienced the same pain in their lives that we ourselves have experienced?
How much grander and greater a country this nation could be if all of us, citizens and politicians alike, made “provide for the general welfare” the touchstone for political and governmental service. For as a great man once said:
The basic things expected by our people of their political
and economic systems are simple. They are :Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.
Jobs for those who can work.
Security for those who need it.
The ending of special privilege for the few.
The preservation of civil liberties for all.
The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a
wider and constantly rising standard of living.These are the simple, the basic things that must never be
lost sight of in the turmoil and unbelievable complexity of
our modern world. The inner and abiding straight of our
economic and political systems is dependent upon the degree
to which they fulfill these expectations.