How much of your soul are you willing to sell? | Eastern North Carolina Now

    A Democrat friend recently said to me; "At some point Democrats and Republicans have to get together in order to have progress on any thing." He is right.

    Compromise is necessary in both democratic and republican forms of government. Notice the lower case "d" and "r." However compromise can only come about when the parties are fairly close to agreement. Today wide and deep canyons separate political thinking in the United States. The best example of a black or white issue I know of is abortion. The prime reason is this is true is that the fetus cannot be partially aborted. It is either alive or dead. The road to compromise on this takes us into issues of population control, poverty, religion, morals and others. So, for those who have Christian beliefs, or strong non religious beliefs about the value of life, there is no compromise. Those who compromise so that even a few abortions are permitted feel they are trading, or selling a part of their soul.

    Others have strong beliefs about the Constitution and the descriptive writings of those who framed it.

    This brings us to the up-coming primary election. Several candidates seem to either have sold out their beliefs or to never have been committed to beliefs of conscience to begin with.

    Lyndon Baines Johnson used the shame of not being man enough to compromise along with a system of payoffs from the US Treasury to get elected officials to do his bidding. Within his statement of "Come, let us compromise" there was always a payoff. We saw this game when Congress voted on ObamaCare. Many US House and Senate members sold some of their soul to Lyndon and many sold their soul on ObamaCare in order to get something else they wanted. Those sales brought us a lot of bad government such as the Great Society with all of its welfare, a lot of bad civil rights laws and the Viet Nam War.

    If life is either whole and alive or dead we must ask the same question about the soul. We can lose and arm or leg or other body parts and continue to function as a person. The same must be true of a soul. We can sell or loose or abandon parts of the soul with other parts still functioning. Do not murders and thieves attend church and do some good things. The soul is different from the body in that if we loose enough body parts we will die, but we can sell or loose all of a soul and continue to live. We can easily observe that body parts are missing but only with a lot of deep contemplation can we know if any part or even all of a soul is missing.

    If you are willing to accept only a part of the above as being true, then you have to have deep suspicions about the sincerity of those who are running in the Republican primary who were recently Democrats and also those who profess to be Republicans, even conservatives, and vote with the Democrats on the great majority of the issues. What about those who used their position of leadership in the Republican party to attack elected Republican officials. Did these people think they could sell only the political part of their soul? You cannot look at them and tell a part of their soul is missing. And that is why selling a part of the soul for some people is easy.