The heart of what’s cold and cruel in our world isn’t the indifference of the natural world. The natural world is what it is. We all have to die someday in some way. It’s just a matter of when. What’s the heart of what’s cold and cruel in our world is the cold, cruel indifference resting in the hearts of men who choose to not have empathy or exercise moral imagination.
The personification of just that was, certainly, found with the recent antics and words of Don Young. To put your thumbs in your ear and flap your fingers and stick out your tongue and break out into mocking laughter while a speech, on the House floor, was being made advocating for the naming of a post office in Waldwick, N.J., after its fallen soldier, Staff Sgt. Joseph D’Augustine, a demolition expert who spent two tours in Iraq and two in Afghanistan and who died attempting to defuse a bomb, was about as contemptible and cold and cruel as it gets. Can you imagine the mortification his family and friends must have felt?
But that’s a problem with the cold and cruel: they can’t imagine. It’s been offered Young didn’t hear what was being said as an excuse. Well, that’s the big problem with the cold and cruel; they can’t imagine because they don’t listen to the story being told. Most of the time the cold and cruel don’t even know that they’re being cold cruel like with Young not offering, immediately, a personal apology to the D’Augustine family, much less the nation for his cruel gesture in light of what was being said in honor of D’Augustine’s ultimate sacrifice. Its importance doesn’t register on him. His heart has grown too cold, like ice, to realize.
Look the other day how hurtful the man was to the students, faculty and parents of the Wasilla High student who recently took his life, scolding them for not being supportive enough. Why, how does he know that? Who was he to paint such a broad brush of blame over such a heart rendering and, more often than not, unfathomable tragedy? Instead of offering his commiseration he offers ridicule.
Again, how indifferent and disconnected the cold and cruel can be to the situation on hand. After shooting at the hip with rip and tear words, look how Young stands his ground, a sight only the Republican Party’s Reince Priebus and maybe Lucifer himself can be proud of. Such cold and cruel arrogance.
On Election Day we’ve got a big choice to be making.
Anyway, I’d like to shout-out my well wishes to Shelley Gill to her full recovery from surgery. Thank God she had affordable access to health care; thank God someone cared; thank God for Obama-Care.
With the cold, cruel consequences of Gov. Sean Parnell’s decision not to expand Medicare to encompass the poor, how can that man sleep with himself and say he’s pro life? Only the insincere can, only the cold and cruel can.
On Election Day, indeed, we’ve got a really, really big choice to make. Are we going to vote to go down the path of the cold and cruel?
Anyway, I’d like to make one last shout-out to Sen. Mark Begich. Senator, you’ve got two great staff workers, Holly and Evan, working their hearts out for you down here in Homer. Their stout spirits and determination to overcome is of the stuff right out of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, but of the spirit of our time. I wish you could have been here, in Homer, to catch its production on the Mariner stage. It was magnificent.
Tim O’Leary
