As a prefatory note, my position is strong on holding the soles of all aspirants to the most powerful office in the world hard against the flame. (Especially the one you are most predisposed to support) Ask the toughest questions imaginable. Demand the most honest and direct answers. Then dig through every trash bin and into every closet and unearth every grave for the evidence that what was told to you in response was in fact believable and truthful. Then, follow the response you received with, “EXACTLY HOW do you intend to implement that Senator?”  

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Perhaps the best known acronym in marketing is KISS; “Keep-It-Simple, Stupid.” However that has been proven extraordinarily effective over an extraordinarily wide swath of issues that lend themselves to marketing, when it comes to the real nitty-gritty of life-matters, it’s deficient to the max. Life is lived in the grays, and KISS presumes that everything in life can be distilled to starkly contrasting blacks and whites.

Meryl Streep’s Oscar-winning portrayal of Sophie Zawistowski in 1982’s Sophie’s Choice may provide an excellent reductio ad absurdam (reduction to the absurd) example of the proposition. As a Jewess mother in Nazi Germany’s “final solution,” she is forced to choose which of her two small children will live, which will die. And a refusal to choose will result in both children being killed.

One more?

A decade or so ago, 60 Minutes featured a story of the life-and-death choice a Special Forces major had to make just prior to the onset of hostilities in the gulf War. He and a team of forward observers had been sent on a reconnaissance mission into Iraq, in anticipation of the invasion that was to immediately follow the shock-and-awe bombardment of targets within Iraq. The team was lying low in a shallow wadi, just off a dirt path that led to a nearby village of peasants. Just prior to dusk, a small girl, while leading a goat down the path, on her way back to the village, spotted the team.

The ethical dilemma that confronted the major: He was under standing orders to kill any native who might endanger the lives of the invasion force, who might thereby threaten the success of the entire operation, in the case that their position got reported to Iraqi forces. An innocent little girl’s life was 100% in his hands.

KISS?

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The issues confronting the American electorate are more shot through with incredibly complex nuance than I can ever recall in my life. The very future of not only the American experiment in a republican democracy that began in 1787 is at stake, but so much of the future of the entire world. At stake is not something so trivial as which shade of color to paint a room. Nonetheless, I find that oh so many members of the electorate feel compelled to reduce them to the trivial and even to the profane.

Yesterday morning, May 19^th, I heard it once again. C-SPAN’s Washington Journal viewer call-in program was white-noise running in the background. “I could never vote for Barack Obama. He’s a Muslim, and he’s got a secret agenda to bring down our Christian way of life.”

To disclosure, not only do I find such folks not at all American, not at all “Christian” (Permit this atheist to refer such ilk to Luke 10: 25-37, the “Parable of the Good Samaritan”), I don’t even think of them as human. To me, such mindless ilk are sub-human — even sub-simian; more along the lines of reptilian. Such issuers of that kind of profanity lack even the courage to enunciate their base bigotry in terms certain. I loathe disingenuousness, but if I employ the ‘N’-word, none of this will be published. I know; I’ve tried. But that’s what all references to Senator Obama’s supposed connections to the Muslim faith are: they would call him a _(N-word)_, but for their deficit of courage.

And that brings me to the two points hinted at in the title; both revolving about “courage.”

One, and the lesser of the two, for my purposes here, is that a candidate’s religious orientation should have zero to do with his or her fitness for the office. All that should count is whether he or she can govern effectively within the constraints of the Constitution of the United States, which is the entirety of that which they swear to “preserve, protect, and defend.”

A “Christian” tyrant is as damning as one from any other faith, or none at all. And the history of the CE (or, AD, for all who insist upon anno domini) world is suffuse with sadistic terrorism concocted under the umbrella of Christianity.   

This courage refers to that which would be needed to honestly acknowledge the singular desire is to reduce everything to KISS standards: I don’t know anything of the genuine issues, I lack all interest in trying to learn what they are or do research for genuine, palpable evidence that will disclose where Candidates A and B truly stand on them, and — bottom line — I don’t have the least intellect to decide between what would only serve to confuse me anyway.  In other words, the courage to admit, I’m Stupid, and that’s why keeping it simple is the path I’ve chosen.

It has always been this way, not only through American history, but through all history into the prehistoric. The difference is, today we really possess trainloads of empirical evidence that all broad-brush presuppositions are inapposite, are false, that the multiplicity of exceptions are the norm behind all that composes “normal.”

Given the essential cowardice of those who try to use the “Muslim” cover, I just don’t see them summoning the kind of courage it would require to shake off that cloak.    

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing the rest of us is the courage to openly confront those who do try to camouflage their true colors. Repeatedly I’ve heard folks say something along the lines, “Look, I’ve got family (or _[replace with whatever is appropriate]_), and to keep the peace . . .” To all who posit that, I only ask what your response might be if you knew the offending person had forwarded anonymous Internet emails falsely accusing your neighbor of being a sex offender, or had broken into your neighbor’s house, or had participated in the beating of a minority, or in the commission of a murder? Where do you draw the line? When, and where will you differentiate between the wish to keep “peace,” to “not rock the boat,” and the moral grit to stand and be counted? Does it always come down to doing what is easy, or doing what you know is right?  Finally, what does opting for the easy route really say about the kind of person you really are?

If enough of us compose a majority, and if that majority is more concerned with not making waves than with bringing a bigot up short for his or her bigotry, how then can we ever stand up during the National Anthem and the silly notion that somehow “land of the brave” can ever apply to us?

Think about it. No! really . . . think about it. The future of our country and that of the world may hang by how you define yourself.

— Ed Tubbs

     Palm springs, CA