"Five to one, baby, One in five,
No one here gets out alive;
...They've got the guns,
but we've got the numbers;
Gonna win, yeah, we're taking over."
--The Doors, "Five to One"
"To save all we must risk all."
Friedrich Von Schiller (17591805), German dramatist, poet, essayist. Fiesco, in Fiesco, act 4, scene 6.
The other day I was answering a comment on my article "Forcing Their Hand," (December 19, 2009, OpEdNews.com), when I had an epiphany, about our current health care bill predicament. I'll quote, with a couple of small corrections, my reply:
"In military terms, this is a war of attrition. They win if, and only if, we give up. As in all wars there will be miscalculations and betrayals of trust: not simply to our enemies, but sometimes people will betray us to further their own ambitions--think Charge of the Light Brigade, where Lord Luccan ordered his brother-in-law Lord Cardigan to attack in the hopes that Cardigan, whom he hated, would get killed."
"We are the insurgents: we don't have to win; we simply have to avoid losing. The only way we lose is 1) they kill us, 2) we give up."
"Or as Jim Morrison sang, 'We got the numbers, but they've got the guns.' As long as we keep it non-violent, their guns don't matter."
Okay, I got The Doors quote wrong.
Think about this: for the last sixty years, we have been trying to achieve a full blown health care solution for this country, without success. President Johnson, one time "Master of the Senate" (as Robert Caro called him), possibly the single best political arm twister in American history, made several attempts before he finally got Medicare and Medicaid passed in the 1960s.
Part of the effectiveness of the conservative movement over the last forty-plus years--besides their lip service towards rational truth in favor of emotional statements defining reality--is their patience. The liberal-left concept of sharing, peace, love, and brotherhood that suffused the Sixties failed, not because it was wrong; it failed because we were impatient. To quote another song by The Doors, "When the Music's Over," from the album Strange Days, "We want the world and we want it "NOW!"
Gotta love Jim Morrison.
