A Republican Motto - and - A Parable, In Paintings By Rembrandt, Giordano, Moreau, Roosendael, Bodinier and Etty

                                                             Autore Luca Giordano

                                                       Gustave Moreau   1865

                                                          Nicolaes Roosendael   1665

                                                    Guillaume Bodinier    1826

                                    

                                                    William Etty

                                                     Rembrandt

     Since before the start of the Twentieth Century, the motto of the Republican 

Party has been, "The business of government is business!"  The unspoken half of that 

motto is, "People are expendable."  Republicans have exploited the natural resources

of the Earth without regard to the environmental harm they have done to the planet 

or the people who live on it.  For them it has always been profit before people.

     In recent weeks, the Trump administration has cut funding for vital research into 

finding cures for cancer, as well as further cuts for health and education services 

for the American people.  And now the Republican Congress is preparing to pass 

a bill which will ensure that new drastic cuts in healthcare will be put in place in order 

to provide more tax cuts for Trump and his billionaire supporters.  Trump is the 

personification of the philosophy which says that greed is good and empathy for 

others is a sign of weakness.  He thinks only of himself; he is as devoid of empathy

as a sociopath murderer. 

     Now is the time when we should be remembering the story of The Good Samaritan,

which has been handed down to us by the Gospel of St. Luke, in a book called The

Holy Bible.  That is a book which Trump claims to love, but he has never read it, and

he only sells copies of it for his personal profit.  But for the past five hundred years or

more, this story of the compassionate man who had empathy for a suffering stranger, 

has resonated strongly with artists, and many of them painted moving images of the

humanitarian who provided life-giving care for a fellow human being.  (A half dozen

of these paintings are shown above.)

     The story in the Saint Luke Gospel is the tale of a lone traveler who was attacked

on the road, by robbers who severely wounded him and stripped him of everything he

owned, including his clothes, and then left him for dead, lying bleeding by the side of

the road.  As the suffering man was lying there, cold and bloodied, two self-righteous

religious men passed him by without offering him any comfort or assistance.  The first

one was a priest and the second was a Levite but neither one stopped to help because 

it did not profit them to provide him with any aid.  But then the Good Samaritan came

along the road and he rescued the stranger, dressing his wounds and clothing him.  He 

then took the man to an inn, to be fed and cared for by the innkeeper until the man was 

recovered, and the Good Samaritan paid for the man's stay at the inn.

     The story was another of the parables intended to show the importance of always 

treating other people the way we would want them to treat us.  That is generally called

the golden rule.  Right now, a majority of our Republican Congress members who call

themselves Christians, do not see any profit for themselves in following the golden rule.

They proudly wear their little gold crosses and proclaim their true faith, while at the 

same time they they are voting to take away healthcare for millions of Americans and

close rural hospitals all across the country, just to make the super-rich even wealthier.

     Trump doesn't allow any Good Samaritans in the US Congress. 

                                                                                Eugene P. McNerney