Standing on Principle

Henry Clay

I just wrote a comment to Baysage, stating that the time of witnessing for Principle and Honor is coming, it is not  a thing of the past. Sometimes we think it is a thing of the past because in our times standing on principle has become very much a  private virtue, and the public forum is devoid of such scenes. We tend not to make a display and stand on principle... we are "professionals" and we get along.
Nor are we brought to trial and forcibly made to witness our principles, as was Bonhoeffer.

Our government can hardly perform simple functions, such as keeping the government agencies running. The simplest matters, such as allowing the FAA to continue to collect taxes dues from air traffic, require the genius of compromise of at least a Henry Clay... or greater!

And just as the generations that immediately followed Henry Clay, we shall find it harder and harder to maintain the facade of a union of like minds: the compromisers rapidly fall out, by choice or by the ballot box.
Like those generations, we shall enter life in atmospheres of increasing bitterness and animosity and incivility, and we shall believe it a normal way to live, because we have always lived so.

And like those generations, we shall be allowed to make the most serious stand on principle possible: whether to go to jail for our principles, whether to fight and die for our beliefs.
The people of the generations born around the turn of the century are the Oliver Wendell Holmes' who follow on the Henry Clays, coming after the period of unity, after that of compromise, coming into a world where Union must be fought for.

We shall yet stand on principle.
In our own lives, we who write and read here shall attest that, just as Holmes, our souls will be touched "by fire" in a conflagration of belief and principle, and shall discover that Principles without Charity are empty... empty... mere scraps of paper and will be blown away as was the right of habeas corpus blown away like an ill-fitting hat, one of the first casualties of the Civil War.
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