Profiles in cowardice

Every year Profile in Courage Awards are given to recognize individuals who, by acting in accord with their conscience, risked their careers or lives by pursuing a larger vision of the national, state or local interest in opposition to popular opinion or pressure from constituents or other local interests. This award was created in 1989 to recognize and celebrate the quality of political courage and sought to make Americans aware of the conscientious and courageous acts of their public servants, and to encourage elected officials to choose principles over partisanship – to do what is right, rather than what is expedient

In recent days, though, one is increasingly forced to conclude that the present times require instead a different kind of award—a profile in cowardice award. This award needs to be given to politicians and public servants who betray the public trust, who refuse to stand up for their own beliefs, who cower behind platitudes and lies, and who find truth to be too uncomfortable to embrace.

It is not difficult to select them today—in the US it is the republican leadership who have been unable to stand up to the worst instincts of their followers, who have declined to uncover lies about death panels and health care and who have dragged the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt to an abyss of nihilism and know-nothingness. Recent events have only further bared their cowardice as they refused to condemn their party representatives who called their President a liar and another member “ a baby killer”. By refusing to stand up and condemn these incidents as soon as they occurred they have become complicit in them, and indeed implicitly encouraged the environment of hate that seems to be enveloping the country today.

Despite their avowed commitment to the truth, media journalists recently have also fallen into the category of possible award winners. Under the guise of objectivity and “on the one hand and on the other hand” type of discourse, they have hewed so far away from the facts and truth, that they more resemble the journalists of the gutter press than a national newspaper. Indeed nothing has degraded the public discourse in the US than the TV networks- FOX TV and newspapers (even the Wall Street Journal) spawned by Rupert Murdoch. Yet main stream media are, with a few rare exceptions, afraid of calling these channels out on their outrageous assertions and instead cower under the flimsy pretext of being objective and presenting both sides of an issue. These too are deserving of the profiles in cowardice awards.

The fact is that as Dante once said that “the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality”.

In these times, it is also well to remember what Abe Lincoln said, and who President Obama quoted in his very eloquent address to his party of the eve of the vote on health care reform: “I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.”

For the rest, his speech is a reminder of what it should mean to be a public servant and is worth listening to as well.