THE ROY ROGERS STRAIGHT-SHOOTER AWARD

By Robert P. Bomboy

        To young people today the name "Roy Rogers" may mean nothing more than a chicken sandwich in a fast-food restaurant. But to older people who were children in the 1940s and 1950s, his name means much, much more.

            Like millions of other kids at that time I saw and enjoyed Roy Rogers' movies and wore a Roy Rogers leather gunbelt for two six-shooter cap pistols. As a movie star on a Palomino horse, he was a straight-shooter, a visible emblem of honesty and integrity. He inspired us with his willingness to stand up for the things he believed. He gave us standards to live by that helped teach us the difference between right and wrong, and he lived his life off-camera with the same decency and humility that he projected in the movies and on television.

            He rode into the sunset long before Donald Trump entered the White House. He and the decency of his world were not here to help us when Trump turned everything upside down.

As I've been saying in these columns since last January, Donald Trump is a demagogue who is doing a lot of bad things - exploiting prejudice and ignorance; whipping up the passions of the American people and shutting down reasoned deliberation; advocating immediate, violent action to address national crises; overturning and discarding our long-established and most cherished customs of political conduct.

In a column last May, I wrote: "At what point will we stand up and say to him and the millionaires around him in Washington - who don't represent us and our families and the good people we know and care about here in the Milton-Lewisburg area - that we won't stand for this anymore? Why is it that they can cheat and lie to us, again and again, and no one is standing up to them?"

        Last week Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona - a Republican whose good character Roy Rogers would have recognized - stood up in the Senate and told the truth. He was preceded by Senator Bob Corker of New York and the senior senator from Arizona, John McCain, but it was Senator Flake's almost poetic words that sounded loudest.

            I don't have room here for all the good and true things he said, but I want to point out some of the best excerpts. Senator Flake said:

• "We must stop pretending that the degradation of our politics and the conduct of some in our executive branch are normal. They are not normal.
• "The personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedoms, and institutions, the flagrant disregard for truth or decency, the reckless provocations, most often for the pettiest and most personal reasons, [have] nothing whatsoever to do with the fortunes of the people that we have all been elected to serve.
• "Mr. President, I rise today to say: Enough. We must dedicate ourselves to making sure that the anomalous [that is, bizarre] never becomes normal. With respect and humility, I must say that we have fooled ourselves for long enough that a pivot to governing is right around the corner, a return to civility and stability right behind it. We know better than that. By now, we all know better than that.
• "The notion that one should stay silent as the norms and values that keep America strong are undermined and as the alliances and agreements that ensure the stability of the entire world are routinely threatened by the level of thought that goes into 140 [Twitter] characters - the notion that one should say and do nothing in the face of such mercurial behavior is not historic and, I believe, is profoundly misguided.
• "Leadership does not knowingly encourage or feed ugly and debased appetites in us. . . . These articles of civic faith have been central to the American identity for as long as we have all been alive. They are our birthright and our obligation. We must guard them jealously, and pass them on for as long as the calendar has days. To betray them, or to be unserious in their defense is a betrayal of the fundamental obligations of American leadership. And to behave as if they don't matter is simply not who we are.
• "Politics can make us silent when we should speak, and silence can equal complicity [that is, being involved in wrongdoing or illegal activity]. I have children and grandchildren to answer to, and so, Mr. President, I will not be complicit."
  
  We don't hear such clarion calls anymore when everyone we know tells us to keep our head down and say nothing."

            Senator Jeff Flake didn't rage. He stood quietly and, from the Senate rostrum, spoke truth to power. In doing so, he sacrificed a career he’d spent a lifetime building. But he regarded his character and the respect of his children and grandchildren more.

For doing that, and saying what he did, I'm giving him today the Roy Rogers Straight-Shooter Award.