'We're Better Than This' -- But Are We?

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, 1951-2019

I started calling him “The Prophet” in 2008 during a tense Congressional hearing about the drug epidemic in Major League Baseball.
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With Biblical emphasis, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings scolded the stewards of baseball for tolerating the widespread usage of performance-enhancing drugs during the home-run frolics in the recent generation.

His powerful figure and righteous stance was befitting the prophet who is honored by Jews, Christians and Muslims.

“This scandal happened under your watch,” Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, said in “Field of Dreams” gravity to Commissioner Bud Selig and Donald Fehr of the players union during the Congressional hearing last Tuesday. “I want that to sink in. It did.”

That’s what I wrote back then, and I followed him from afar as he dominated Congressional hearings during the disgraceful time of Donald J. Trump, trying to motivate see-no-evil Republican representatives with a Biblical exhortation: “We’re better than this.” Amen.

I was horrified to see how weary he appeared during those hearings early in 2019, and I was not surprised when he passed months later. He gave it all he had.
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Now Elijah Cummings is returning to Congress, in the form of a portrait by a young Black artist from Baltimore,  Jerrell Gibbs. The story of the artist and the work is in the Sunday New York Times and, I am sure, elsewhere.
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But are “we” better than this? And who is “we?” 

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I ask this as Elijah Cummings’ nation seems to be degrading itself, day by day. Just a few examples:

--- A thick swath of adults are refusing to take Covid vaccinations that would protect themselves and their loved ones and other human beings – virus droplets as lethal as, well, bullets.

-- Politicians in many states are conniving to make it more difficult for American citizens to vote.

-- And people are scooping up all forms of rapid-fire guns to prepare for, well, for what?

“I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children” – “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” Bob Dylan,  1963.  (Talk about prophecy.)

Let us swerve to 2021 – in the wake of the Rittenhouse decision in Wisconsin -- when parents in Michigan bought a very lethal pistol for their 15-year-old son.
The boy (“in the hands of young children”) gives off appeals for help, and is ignored by his parents.

His obsession with the weapon is noticed by school officials who, at the very least, notify the mother, whose reaction is to send her son a snarky (sign-of-the-times) text message:
“LOL I’m not mad at you,” Jennifer Crumbley texted her son. “You have to learn not to get caught.”

The next day, her son killed four classmates and wounded many others in the high school.
Then she and her husband went on the lam and were flushed out in downtown Detroit.

Now it appears that Mrs. Crumbley wrote a letter to none other than President-elect Trump in 2016, praising his stance on freedom to carry a gun. 

​“As a female and a Realtor, thank you for allowing my right to bear arms,” she wrote, according to The Daily Beast. “Allowing me to be protected if I show a home to someone with bad intentions. Thank you for respecting that Amendment.”

She complained about parents at other schools where the “kids come from illegal immigrant parents” and “don’t care about learning.”

In her own way, Jennifer Crumbley was prophetic. When I read her screed, I began to think of others - young guns, so to speak -- who scorn the country they allegedly serve.
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The sneer on the young man’s face reminds me of members of Congress named Gaetz, Hawley, Cawthorn, and the unleashed aggression in the mother’s “LOL” text reminds me of sneering warrior-representatives Greene and Boebert.

Are “we” better than this?

Soon the august presence of Rep. Elijah Cummings will take its place in the Halls of Congress.
I hope his ideals will grace those who walk past. 

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