Posted by
KsReaganite on Friday, January 19, 2007 12:09:39 PM
The other day Senator Ted Kennedy was waxing eloquent about speaking truth to power regarding the continued prosecution of the war in Iraq. Funny because far from being a David fighting Goliath, the Bostonian gentleman is the shining example of how power can shield from the consequences of truth…Chappaquiddick, Miami Beach,..no need to go on.
Truth has been spoken to power in Boston before…in our lifetimes and Kennedy was there along with many others who make up our social, cultural, and political power structure. For it was not that long ago at Foxboro Stadium that one solitary shepherd from faraway Poland looked into the eyes of his flock and said what almost none of them wanted to hear. At that huge open air mass, with the glitterati of the Northeast in attendance along with tens of thousands of others and the rest of the powerful eagerly watching, Karol Wojtyla said words that boldly proclaimed the humanitarian tenets of his faith, in words that were sure to have offended both liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, the traditional and the reformists. Half of his statement certainly offended me as standing face to face with America, the Pope minced no words in taking on two pet causes of the powerful: The Church stands with the unborn and the undocumented. In one fell swoop John Paul the Second had managed to affirm his unshakeable belief in the basic humanity of all human beings. I could only imagine how liberals like Pelosi and Kennedy were squirming as were conservatives like Tancredo and Santorum. If the Roman pontiff cared what these men and women of power thought of his speaking the uncomfortable, unvarnished, unabridged truth, he certainly did not show it. Sure, the liberals wished that he had soft-pedaled on abortion and the conservatives fervently hoped he did not bring up immigration. Leave it to a pesky Pole to upset the applecart of hedonistic hallucinations.
Was it not Jan Sobiesky who stopped the mighty Turks at Vienna when the rest of Europe was shaking in its boots? Was it not Cardinal Prince Adam Sapieha who defied the Nazis and kept hope alive in secret schools and seminaries?
Yep….merely offending just about everyone in the political galaxy in the most powerful country in the world, and pouring water on their smug self-righteousness was not about to stop a Pole from saying it as he saw it.