Letter to the editor: Compromise is crucial to politics and democracy
What is “politics”? To me it has always meant the realm of the possible. It meant that individuals with different approaches worked out agreements that recognized the goals of both sides and tried to give some satisfaction to each participant.
Today, politics means ideological opposition to anyone who does not affirm the total proposal. Thus, compromise means the loss of strength. Working with opponents is anathema, since it destroys the purity of one’s position. How can our nation survive? How can diverse relationships among our citizenry be maintained with peace and harmony when it is impossible to consider anything that is different from one’s own personal beliefs, be they religious, political or cultural? If that pall had overshadowed members of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, no document would have been completed and most probably no United States would exist today.
Here it is, 2024, and a candidate for the presidency envisages destruction of that glorious union that has evolved into a democracy while providing dynamic leadership to the world. He wants to pulverize it by creating a regime that resembles Putin’s Russia or even Maduro’s Venezuela.
How can anyone vote for someone who belittles persons with speech impediments or who use a cane or a wheelchair, who lauds the felons who vandalized the Capitol as “political hostages” while never honoring the police who were killed or injured in that attempted coup, who yearns to return women to second-class citizenship and to persecute LGBTQ communities, who scorns prisoners of war and even those killed in battle, who supports white supremacists and so-called “Christian” nationalists, who hypocritically pretends religiosity, who relentlessly aims to destroy faith in our legal/judicial system, and who, most importantly, is actively destroying trust in our government and in our democracy?
May God deliver us from such arrogance and Machiavellian/un-American narcissism.
T. Carl Sosnowski, North Canton
This article originally appeared on The Repository: Letter to the editor: Compromise is crucial to politics and democracy
