Mea Culpa?
In the Catholic Church, we confess our sins, and beg the forgiveness of our Lord, our families and our fellow believers while professing “Mea culpa! Mea culpa! Mea maxima culpa!” which is Latin for “My fault. My fault. My most grievous fault!”
We do this to relieve ourselves of the burden of hubris, the natural tendency of mankind to get ruffled feathers when our own shortcomings are exposed. By not merely accepting fault, but proclaiming it before all, we banish notions of having been falsely accused, or put upon by those who would hold us to higher standards than they hold themselves.
Why is this important?
Without the debasement of self, the errors we make lie protected behind our own self-esteem, our own personal bulwark against the crushing feeling of failure. Unless that defense be overcome, hubris will stand in the place of shame, precluding the healing power of naked truth.
This is simply the nature of man. I make this point for good reason. Not to wink at it, or excuse it in any way, but rather to cast a harsh light on it, revealing all its wrinkles, scars and blemishes. Honesty cares nothing for our embarrassment, as honesty is merely what is or isn’t, with no flavors or accoutrements. The wise man knows his weakness, and faces it directly.
The fool denies his weakness, and scurries away from its consequence.
The last election featured a visceral revulsion for a particular candidate simply for who he is, not necessarily what he had done. His opponent, a man with a long but remarkably inconsequential career, laid claim to being everything his counterpart was not, despite ample evidence of his being far more deeply flawed, incapable and corrupt than even the caricature his party had drawn of Donald Trump.
From the very beginning, well before Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President, accusations were lined up on a shelf in the Democratic National Committee headquarters, ready to be leveled at whomever the Republican party chose to bear their standard. The usual, “racist, sexist, homophobic, warmongering, rich, white male-loving, oppressors of people of color” tropes were there, as they always are, but a new category of slur joined them, born of unprecedented corruption facilitated by the mechanisms of government itself, placed in service to a political ideology determined to hide their crimes.
The politicization of federal agencies had been fully completed under Obama. Layered over every act of the bureaucracy was a ideological filter, ensuring only the correctly situated could benefit from whatever policy or program was in the offing. Likewise, the heavy weight of government regulation and, in many cases, illegality, was turned toward the “domestic enemy,” who invariably were members of the opposition party, or simply still believed the promises of the Constitution remained valid.
The full power of government had been coopted for purely political purpose, and the depth and breadth of these violations of federal law could never see the light of day - too many complicit on the one side, and compromised on the other.
Once tormenting your political opponent using the power of government becomes sport, it’s not too great a leap to eliminating your opponent using the power of government, which appears to be the end game behind the Biden Presidency. The redirection of the Department of Homeland Security toward “domestic terrorism,” which exists almost wholly on the Left, is ludicrous when one realizes their targets are wholly on the Right. The purges of those who still hold their Oaths to be sacred is well underway, becoming so brazen, so obvious, as to appear surreal.
I have often called on self-described “mainstream Democrats” to account for the consequences of their votes. They claim to believe in the same Constitutional rights as everyone else, yet consistently vote to empower people who treat the Constitution as an impediment to Utopia. They believe in Constitutional rights for themselves only, and have no problem turning a blind eye toward outrageous abuses.
There is something wrong here. There is a hidden nature to the rank and file Democrat, permitting them to say one thing while doing quite the opposite, yet still accounting themselves as “truthful.”
Is it a case of having so dehumanized their opposition, that lying to them cannot be considered a vice, as they aren’t deserving of the truth? Do they simply consider the ordinary norms of human interaction as too great a burden to bear where “deplorables” are concerned? Are they awash in the self-interested navel-gazing of pseudo-intellectualism, where a failure to immediately agree with them is incontrovertible evidence of a deficient mind? Or are they so convinced of their own infallibility, they will not entertain the idea they may have been in error?
I believe it is all of those reasons, and more.
Recent years have been hellish for the United States. Literally, every single act of this administration has led to a worse circumstance than that inherited from the outgoing administration. Whether your metric is economic, social or national security oriented, the words “unqualified disaster” are appropriate.
My question then, to those of you who voted for Democrats, where is your Mea culpa? Where is your assumption of accountability for your terrible mistake? The evidence could not be more clear, the contrasts could not be drawn more starkly than now. Why have you not beaten your breast and declared your fault?
I know the answer, sadly. In that squirming worm clot you call a brain, you cannot find room for blame.
No corner of that moldy, mildewed space is vacant, having been filled with the detritus of a lifetime of mistakes, grievous errors of judgement, an unending parade of misapprehensions of reality. You can find no room for blame because that would entail looking your mistakes in the eye when instead, you’ve made a lifestyle out of shuffling them off to the farthest reaches of your mind, tossed into an incomprehensibly vast pile, labeled “someone else’s fault.”
Even now, watching the tears flow down the face of a wife or mother receiving home the body of their loved one from Afghanistan, dead due to the indifference and incompetence of the man you voted for, you feel no burden. “They know what they signed up for,” is a popular refrain among your kind.
Recalling your own callous and aggressive attitude toward those of us who dared suggest we might be better served by questioning the unsupported and arbitrary pronouncements of the medical intelligentsia and their government brokers, you now declare a blanket amnesty for everyone’s “COVID mistakes,” knowing full well you are the only ones in need of a get-out-of-jail free card.
The unimaginable loneliness of the stricken COVID patient dying alone, cut off from family and friends by your nonsensical isolation rituals clatters against your smug armor like so many arrows against an impregnable castle wall. The knowledge that hundreds of thousands might have lived had you not denounced interventional drugs as “horse paste” or “aquarium cleaner,” doesn’t drive your to your knees, crushed under the weight of remorse and pleading for forgiveness, instead it’s just another occasion to snicker at those you consider beneath you, perhaps even secretly believing the dead got what they deserved for the crime of defying your commands.
Seeing the tens of thousands of vulnerable children being trafficked recklessly across the southern border brings no emotion to your addled existence. Skyrocketing prices for energy and fuel eating up the spending power of the poor you claim to care about means nothing. “Have to break an egg to make an omelet,” right?
Through it all you tell yourself, “I know what’s best. Clearly, if the policies I support aren’t working, it’s because someone is sabotaging them. I only need a bit more power, a bit more control to keep these cretins from ruining my grand plans, which they are simply too obtuse to understand.”
And that is how you decide opposition must be eliminated. That is why you have no Mea Culpa to offer us. You aren’t sorry for any of it.
Even the stuffing of boxcars won’t be enough to break you from your spell. Even the smell of the camps, the stench of death hanging over the “final solution,” will prove insufficient to rouse you from your self-induced stupor.
You have no Mea culpa because you care about no one but yourself, the very person you know the least.
Call yourself a Democrat? Fine. Now we all know just what that means, and God help us, we’ll make certain you can never hold power again.