The Bully Pulp Pit

Congress is back in session. The Republicans are in charge. Instead of focusing on job creation and budget balancing, they go after the weakest thing they can find and try to squash it because part of its work flies in the face of one of their cherished principles: the rights of the unborn. They are busy swatting flies while the lion roars.
Funding for Planned Parenthood is on the block because it pays for poor people’s abortions. Better to have a child grow up to find out his father was a rapist. Better he grow up in a slum with a single parent who did not want him in the first place. That’s bound to have a good outcome. There may be occasional exceptions, but I will bet there are many more drug dealers than Lions Club members coming out of that scenario. Ensuring unwanted unborn rights and removing the rights of rape victims is small ball with little risk because the oppressed in this case have no political or economic clout. They are usually poor.
It seems that no matter what party is in power, there is a tendency to try for victories over small issues rather than go after big game. Health care was not exactly small game, but it was in comparison to the budget deficit, the recession, and job creation. The form of health care that eventually passed was somewhat flawed, but it still amounted to an attempt to get more comprehensive about health care in America. The way we had gone about it in the past was obsolete. We had to go in a different direction. We did, but not in an effectively sustainable one. The healthcare baby may be worth saving, but the bath water needs cleaning up.
Maybe political bodies and politicians themselves are like some college football programs that begin the season by playing some patsies before getting to the tough league schedule. Or maybe they never get to the tough schedule because they are too busy picking on small adversaries and claiming victory the way a bully does. Planned Parenthood is a small adversary. So are illegal immigrants small adversaries. And so are small town foreclosure sufferers.
A short alert by Freakonomics in the February 4, 2011 New York Times cited a study that links negligent or inattentive fatherhood to a propensity for bullying. Apparently the study points to the role of a child’s perception as to whether or not he or she is being paid enough attention by the father. If a child feels neglected by the father, he or she will have a greater tendency to bully.
If this is true, I wonder how many politicians, particularly Republican politicians, have been the victims of neglectful fathers. If their fathers were so busy making a living or getting rich that they did not spend time with their children, this phenomenon could explain the mean-spiritedness that characterizes some politicians in congress and in state legislatures today. They would rather pick on the little guy than go after big game such as the deficit and unemployment.
Whatever the case, I wish politicians would show a little more courage and go after the big issues rather than beat to a pulp the little issues and little guys that already live on the margin. Beating up little guys takes no courage at all.