Driving home from work last night I learned that not only is Friday going to be a holiday for federal workers, much of Washington, D.C. is also going to be effectively shut down after about two in the afternoon today. Members of the D.C. Police department will be escorting President Reagan's body from Andrews Air Force Base to Constitution Avenue, where the coffin will be transferred to the caisson and brought to the Rotunda.
Over the next couple of days, hundreds of thousands of people will pay their respects to President Reagan. Listening to the news yesterday, I learned that in California, the lines of those who’d come to the funeral home were so backed up the wait was eight to 11 hours long. Nobody complained.
In the midst of this national outpouring of love for one of the great Presidents of the 20th century, discordant notes have begun to be heard. The front page of today’s Washington Post carried a particularly ugly attack on President Reagan.
But Mr. Reagan would not have been surprised. As personally kind and gentle and optimistic as he was, one of the principle reasons President Reagan succeeded was his keen grasp of human nature. Often he prevailed because he was able to read his opponents and take their measure.
Just as most of America mourns the passing of a genuinely historic figure, some of the loopier Reagan critics are surfacing. They are intent on reliving the glory days of the 1980s when they masqueraded their message of hate as differences over public policy.
In physics, for every action there is an equal opposite reaction. Not so in the case of Mr. Reagan. The reaction of ugly hate is tiny compared to the beautiful action of tens of millions.
There is an application to what you and I are about. What made me think of this was a piece in yesterday’s New York Times by David Brooks.
Brooks made a number of intriguing points about the Gipper, but none more important than how our 40th President revitalized a conservative movement that had sunk into a funk. Whereas, “Once it was liberals who rhapsodized about progress,†Brooks wrote, “since Reagan's time, it sometimes appears that liberals and conservatives have traded places.â€
Pro-lifers never lapsed into despondency. We have no time for that, not when there are unborn babies, little ones born with disabilities, and the medically vulnerable elderly to protect. Besides, as awful as the culture of death most assuredly is, we are confident, in the end, that the better angels of our nature will prevail.
Nor did we allow the ugly things said about us–slurs on our motives, our intelligence, and our commitment to both unborn babies and their moms–to slow us down. What’s at stake is far too important to allow trivia like this to throw us off stride.
But it would be hard to exaggerate the psychological lift we felt to finally have a pro-life President in the White House. Tomorrow, I’d like to talk about how President Reagan and Congressman Henry Hyde came to publicly embrace our cause–and what it meant for us. For it is in their very different but complementary journeys that we see why victory on behalf of life is ultimately inevitable.
I will be traveling on Thursday, so see you later.
Driving home from work last night I learned that not only is Friday going to be a holiday for federal workers, much of Washington, D.C. is also going to be effectively shut down after about two in the afternoon today. Members of the D.C. Police department will be escorting President Reagan's body from Andrews Air Force Base to Constitution Avenue, where the coffin will be transferred to the caisson and brought to the Rotunda.