Who Has The Brake Handle?

In 1971, Jethro Tull put out a song called “Locomotive Breath.”

Jethro Tull – Locomotive Breath (4K/Lyrics)

If you were around then, you probably remember the piano running wild at the front of it, like something already out of control before the first word is sung.

The song is about a man on a runaway train. Everything in his life is coming apart, and the train keeps picking up speed underneath him. He can feel the engine working, the heat and the steam, and he can’t do one thing about it. Somebody has taken the brake handle.

That’s the picture I can’t shake this week. A train with no brake, and a man aboard who can only ride it.

As the song goes on, the man watches the people closest to him leave. His children step off the train at the stations, one at a time. The people he trusted turn out not to be on his side at all. He ends up crawling down the corridor on his hands and knees, still moving, still going nowhere he chose.

Near the end he picks up a Bible, hoping for an answer. But in the song, even heaven has let go of the handle. Nobody is coming to stop that train.

Fifty-five years later, it sounds like a news report.

This February, the President took the country into a war with Iran. The Secretary of Defense promised it would be quick and decisive. That was the boarding call.

Now look at the train. In August, the Army sent letters to the families of the 82nd Airborne telling them the tour was stretched to a full year. The Wall Street Journal reported some units could stay “well into 2027.” Air defense crews went from nine-month tours to twelve. Navy ships are running months at a stretch with less mail and fewer care packages, because the fighting cut off their supply points.

The train is speeding up, not slowing down. At the end of September another carrier group left San Diego, with roughly nine to ten thousand more sailors and Marines headed toward Iran. By the end of November, three carriers are expected in the region.

And the man at the throttle said it plainly enough. He told TIME it was “possible” he would step up the bombing after the midterm elections.

So who has the brake handle?

That’s the question the song never answers, and it’s the one we can. In the song, somebody stole it. In our country, nobody stole it. It was handed over.

The Constitution gives the power to declare war to Congress, not to the President. That’s the brake. The founders put it in a different car on purpose, so that no one man at the throttle could run the whole train off the rails.

But a brake only works if somebody pulls it. For months now, Congress has sat in the back car with the handle in its lap and done nothing with it. It hasn’t voted this war up and it hasn’t voted it down. It just rides.

Meanwhile the children are stepping off at the stations. NPR reported that in March, the first month of the war, one center that helps troops file as conscientious objectors took on more than eighty new clients. That’s about twice what it sees in a normal year, landing in thirty days. Calls to the GI Rights Hotline more than doubled. One Army counselor described retention with two words: “crumbling fast.”

The Pentagon says there’s no problem. It points to recruiting, and recruiting is up. But a new recruit is not a seasoned sergeant. You can’t replace the people jumping off a moving train with people just buying tickets.

Here’s where I part company with the song.

The song is a tragedy because the man has no way out. It’s fate. Even the Bible can’t help him, and the train simply runs to its end.

We aren’t in a song. We’re in a country with a ballot. The brake handle didn’t vanish. It sits in four hundred and thirty-five House seats and about a third of the Senate, and every one of those seats is on the line November 3rd.

That’s three weeks away. Three weeks to decide whether Congress keeps riding in the back car or gets sent up front with orders to find the brake.

I’m not telling you how to feel about Iran. Good people come down on different sides of that. I’m telling you that a war this big, running this long, with an escalation decision held until after an election, should have a vote on it. And the people who skipped that vote should hear from you.

Call your representative and your two senators. Ask one question: where is the brake, and why haven’t you touched it?

Then on November 3rd, vote like the train is still moving, because it is.

The man in the song never got the handle back. We still can.

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This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.

” Attic Thoughts”-library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing