Doing political research on the Internet affords three kinds of experience. One is coming across a candidate whose site tells a load of aggressive deceptions, at which lies one wants to shout and which to get out of one's head one writes editorials on such forums as nowpublic.com and open.salon.com. Another is the amusement of coming across an occasional funny name such as Crooks and Boozer. And another is coming across someone truly great, which can be a genuine treat and which can build faith that great things are still possible in the United States.
Tom Warren is a candidate for Ohio State House of Representatives. His legal experience includes busting human trafficking rings, prosecuting a 10-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme and putting a corrupt judge behind bars. All of the above were bigger and stronger entities than himself. Yet he fought all of them and prevailed.
Much thought in the recent decades has been given to making distinctions between winners and losers, or to such claims as everyone is responsible for everything that happens to them and that nobody can either help or injure another. This thinking leaves no place for a much more noble and rightful orientation to life - that of a hero. A hero is a strong person who stands up for others who don't have his strength and battles those stronger people who choose to be bullies. To the oppressive and bullying interests, the hero is a menace or a nuisance. To those who stand to be plowed under by such interests, the hero is their voice.
The hero is a supremely American ideal, and one that made possible much of what America has accomplished. The founders of America fought an exceptionally cruel and powerful enemy - the English empire - and by so doing won freedom for their descendants. They did not do so by seeing the world through the lens of winners and losers psychology or by believing that everyone makes their reality or by thinking that nobody can help or injure another. They did so by rallying around the cause of liberty and doing difficult, dangerous and heroic deeds in order to put that cause into effect. The same was the case with the people who've given America civil rights, women's rights and protection for workers against brutal and corrupt business practices.
Much has been done to attack idealism in political and economic matters, wrongly conflating it with such things as Stalinism. The effect has not been to prevent wrong things from happening, but quite the opposite. The effect has been to do away with conscience as a factor in politics and economics, while allowing everything else that is not conscience to continue to go on. The predictable effect has been a vast rise in corrupt, dishonest and brainless practices at every level of society and, as a result, vast degradation in the condition of life for a vast number of people.
At the time that financial elites run corrupt schemes that rob people of their life savings, the family courts use a fraudulent disorder called the Parental Alienation Syndrome to steal children from their mothers, the oil interests aggressively deny reality of global warming, and the military interests hire mercenary organizations to kill more Iraqi civilians that were killed by Saddam Hussein, one thing that is needed the most is for there to be more heroes. The people at the receiving end of these actions did not make their reality; the corrupt entities doing such things did. The people who lost their lives' savings in fraudulent schemes aren't "losers," and the people who got mass-murdered by Blackwater in Iraq did not do so through "negative thinking." They were at the receiving end of corruption and evil, and this is the one and only true reality in this case.
Where conscience is banished, there grows the corruption; and the corruption at this time in America is vast. It does not take a rocket scientists to understand why this is the case. You do away with idealism, you also do away with the liberal conscience. And where there is no conscience, there the corruption breeds.
Now there are many voices on the Right who claim to have conscience and values; but the truth is that most of these voices have none. A person who makes such fraudulent claims as that AIDS is God's way of controlling the homosexual population, that a Satanic New World Order conspiracy runs the world, that 9-11 is God's punishment for America, or that global warming is a communist hoax, has no business claiming to have ethics, values or integrity. Such people are practicing the art of the con. Whereas a person who stands up to severe abuses of power by entities more powerful than himself is someone who can in fact be credited with two great rights: Conscience and Courage. And the more people exhibit such conduct, the better becomes the lot of America and the better becomes the world.
The American Left has been consistently described by many Republicans as lacking values or lacking a conscience. Tom Warren has shown what true liberal conscience is. It is confronting bullying and corrupt interests that prey on people. It is standing up to abusers of power. It is giving people protection from those who would abuse them, defraud them or murder them for their own gain.
Tom Warren shows that the ideal of the hero is not dead and that it can be revived. And America can only gain from such an attitude.
Tom Warren is a candidate for Ohio State House of Representatives. His legal experience includes busting human trafficking rings, prosecuting a 10-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme and putting a corrupt judge behind bars. All of the above were bigger and stronger entities than himself. Yet he fought all of them and prevailed.
Much thought in the recent decades has been given to making distinctions between winners and losers, or to such claims as everyone is responsible for everything that happens to them and that nobody can either help or injure another. This thinking leaves no place for a much more noble and rightful orientation to life - that of a hero. A hero is a strong person who stands up for others who don't have his strength and battles those stronger people who choose to be bullies. To the oppressive and bullying interests, the hero is a menace or a nuisance. To those who stand to be plowed under by such interests, the hero is their voice.
The hero is a supremely American ideal, and one that made possible much of what America has accomplished. The founders of America fought an exceptionally cruel and powerful enemy - the English empire - and by so doing won freedom for their descendants. They did not do so by seeing the world through the lens of winners and losers psychology or by believing that everyone makes their reality or by thinking that nobody can help or injure another. They did so by rallying around the cause of liberty and doing difficult, dangerous and heroic deeds in order to put that cause into effect. The same was the case with the people who've given America civil rights, women's rights and protection for workers against brutal and corrupt business practices.
Much has been done to attack idealism in political and economic matters, wrongly conflating it with such things as Stalinism. The effect has not been to prevent wrong things from happening, but quite the opposite. The effect has been to do away with conscience as a factor in politics and economics, while allowing everything else that is not conscience to continue to go on. The predictable effect has been a vast rise in corrupt, dishonest and brainless practices at every level of society and, as a result, vast degradation in the condition of life for a vast number of people.
At the time that financial elites run corrupt schemes that rob people of their life savings, the family courts use a fraudulent disorder called the Parental Alienation Syndrome to steal children from their mothers, the oil interests aggressively deny reality of global warming, and the military interests hire mercenary organizations to kill more Iraqi civilians that were killed by Saddam Hussein, one thing that is needed the most is for there to be more heroes. The people at the receiving end of these actions did not make their reality; the corrupt entities doing such things did. The people who lost their lives' savings in fraudulent schemes aren't "losers," and the people who got mass-murdered by Blackwater in Iraq did not do so through "negative thinking." They were at the receiving end of corruption and evil, and this is the one and only true reality in this case.
Where conscience is banished, there grows the corruption; and the corruption at this time in America is vast. It does not take a rocket scientists to understand why this is the case. You do away with idealism, you also do away with the liberal conscience. And where there is no conscience, there the corruption breeds.
Now there are many voices on the Right who claim to have conscience and values; but the truth is that most of these voices have none. A person who makes such fraudulent claims as that AIDS is God's way of controlling the homosexual population, that a Satanic New World Order conspiracy runs the world, that 9-11 is God's punishment for America, or that global warming is a communist hoax, has no business claiming to have ethics, values or integrity. Such people are practicing the art of the con. Whereas a person who stands up to severe abuses of power by entities more powerful than himself is someone who can in fact be credited with two great rights: Conscience and Courage. And the more people exhibit such conduct, the better becomes the lot of America and the better becomes the world.
The American Left has been consistently described by many Republicans as lacking values or lacking a conscience. Tom Warren has shown what true liberal conscience is. It is confronting bullying and corrupt interests that prey on people. It is standing up to abusers of power. It is giving people protection from those who would abuse them, defraud them or murder them for their own gain.
Tom Warren shows that the ideal of the hero is not dead and that it can be revived. And America can only gain from such an attitude.
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