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Fearing for the future of America |
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Sunday, 13 September 2009 |
For the first time in a long time — perhaps ever — I was truly in fear for the future of America last week, and it had nothing to do with the 9/11 anniversary.
I relish good political fights as much as anyone. I love ’em. Hell, I make my living off of them.
At least on the federal level, however, (and it is quickly seeping down) the discourse has started to take a bad, vitriolic turn that I am starting to worry is becoming so pervasive as to be irreversible.
The thing that got me into this pessimistic funk was President Barack Obama’s speech. No, not the Wednesday night one where South Carolina Republican Rep. snatched his 15 minutes of fame by shouting “You lie!” in the middle of a presidential address to a joint session of Congress. No, that bit of absurdist political theater was obnoxious, but totally harmless.
What put The Fear in me was Obama’s speech the day before to the nation’s schoolchildren, or, more accurately, the hysterical reaction to that speech. I don’t mean from the cable news whack jobs; their paranoid blathering is to be expected.
I am talking about the good, honest, earnest, salt-of-the-earth Americans who actually sent letters to their kid’s teacher or principal to prevent their child form hearing the President of the United States tell them to work hard in school and “develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems.”
Robotically repeating what they heard their favorite talking head say, these parents explained that they didn’t want socialism jammed down the throats of their sons and daughters. Put aside for a moment that it is absolutely preposterous to believe that a man so deeply and irredeemably in the pocket of Wall Street moneymen is even vaguely socialist, did you really think he was going to open a nationally televised speech to youngsters with “Good morning, my young Marxist comrades”?
Has it really come to this? That the president can’t talk to school kids because we are afraid of what he is going to say to them. Is the man who was elected leader of the free world with 53 percent of the vote so untrustworthy that he can’t address school-age children, as though he were some sort of pedophile?
The problem is that, in the world view of an increasing number of Americans, Obama is something far worse than a pedophile — he is a liberal. (Conservatives are absolutely convinced that he is a liberal; liberals, after watching him in action for a few months, are understandably not so sure.)
The left-wing kooks (see MSNBC) would have you believe that racism is at the root of a lot of this; the conservatives oppose Obama because he is a black man. That is a lot of rubbish. The sad truth is, is that the conservative vs. liberal dichotomy is becoming every bit as froth-at-the-mouth hate-filled as the white vs. black divide used to be, and even more widespread. What was once an annoying pain in the backside from the extreme wings of the right and left is now becoming a cancer upon our nation, metastasizing at a rapid rate and eating away at the body politic from within.
We are used to politicians kicking and eye-gouging, calling names and engaging in all kinds of fair and unfair fighting. But this is different.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse used a good word last week in the context of Obama’s “other” speech about health care, talking about the “poison” in the debate. The poison now is infecting the entire nation, the “people” whom the government is supposed to be of and by and for. Political disputes have gone nuclear, and now the radioactive fallout is raining down on both sides, mutating us into angry, snarling, shouting creatures barely recognizable as civilized human beings.
Nowadays, even the average person on the street views the individual who disagrees with him or her on a political issue as no longer an opponent, but an enemy. And our enemy is not merely wrong; he or she is evil and must be not just defeated, but vanquished, maybe even eliminated.
One of the fuels feeding this phenomenon is the notion that government is the problem. When a self-governing people start to view government as evil, something has gone radically wrong.
Government has its faults, and I am as skeptical of it and the people who run it as anyone, but it is not evil; it is not the enemy.
If you think government IS the problem, what do you want, anarchy? Because that is the definition of no government.
The notion that government can’t be trusted, that it is the problem, started with Democrat Lyndon Johnson and Republican Richard Nixon, with Vietnam and Watergate. Then Ronald Reagan picked up the sentiment and proudly waved it like a flag, pointing the direction to the nascent “conservative movement.” Cheer-led by Rush Limbaugh and a few others, this led to the demonization of liberals, who in many cases were so lily-livered they denied who they were and started referring to themselves as “progressives” to get the bullies to stop hitting them.
The fact that Bill Clinton couldn’t keep his pants zipped gave them the perfect opening to attack and minimalize him (even though he was even LESS liberal than Barack Obama seems to be).
When George W. Bush came in, it was the left’s turn to obnoxiously attack and mindlessly assail.
Bush was dead wrong about the war in Iraq, but he sincerely believed he was right. He wasn’t sending young Americans to die for oil and no, he no more knew about the World Trade Center attacks than FDR knew about Pearl Harbor beforehand. But try telling that to the people who were shouting in the streets at the time, it would be like trying to convince today’s Tea Party types that Obama is not a socialist. We have stopped listening to each other because we are too busy shouting at each other. I used to find that amusing, but now it is getting frightening.
Abraham Lincoln correctly observed that “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
A half-century later, William Butler Yeats weighed in with:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world/ The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned/ The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.
It makes one wonder what rough beast, its hour come around at last, is slouching toward Washington to be born.
We have to get a grip, people.
We have to find a way to back away from the parallel precipices of the extreme left and right wings and start being reasonable once again.
There are legitimate things to disagree with about the health care plan that is causing such anger and resentment lately, but it is not a threat to our freedom or our way of life. When Congress passed the USA Patriot Act without reading it eight years ago, that was a genuine threat to our freedom and our way of life, where were all these folks shouting about “We the People” then?
I’m not trying to get all Rodney King on you here; we shouldn’t all just try to get along. We have political and policy differences and we should argue them out vigorously. But once the fight has been fought and the votes counted, we have to find a way to live together until the next election.
In my younger, more naïve days, I used to wish that politics and government would matter more to people and that we would be as passionate about that as we are about other things in our lives. That will teach me to be careful what I wish for.
When Politics as Usual is calling for calm and civility, you know things have really gone around the bend. |
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 20 September 2009 )
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