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Come, Stand Up for What’s Right: The Emperor Has No Clothes!
Will We Buy the Emperor’s New Clothes?
The Emperor’s New Clothes is a popular fairy tale that tells of two weavers who promise to make the emperor a new suit of clothes, which they claim is made of fine-quality fabrics that are invisible to anyone who is lowly or dim-witted — while they actually make no clothes at all.
The result is that everyone around him starts to believe that the clothes really are invisible. When the emperor appears in public in his new “clothes,” no one has the guts to say that the emperor is naked, out of fear that they will be viewed as stupid.
Finally, a child points at the emperor and yells, “Hey, look! The emperor has no clothes!”
A child’s innocence is thus made more powerful than a tyrant’s vanity.
Since Hans Christian Andersen published this story in 1837, that truth-telling child’s message has become a universal expression used to describe the willful ignorance of unquestioning conformity. Nearly 200 years later, the phrase “emperor’s new clothes” still applies when it’s time to point out hypocrisy and collective denial.
When I look at today’s Republican Party, I cannot fathom why so many of those elected to Congress — men and women who have promised to…
