Only Anger Holds Us Together
I happened to notice a small gathering of folks in my local burgh. A man was speaking in the rain, proclaiming that it was time to "get government out of our back pockets" and give the power back to "the people". He received moderate applause with this line and others like it. There were maybe a few hundred people standing around, mostly passersby at lunch. A bunch of others had some fantastic signs with messages such as "President Fail", "Honk If I'm Paying Your Mortgage", and "Obama Socialist Pig". Yes, I ran into a "Tea Party". My normal reaction to this sort of thing is untempered rage. However, I tried to take my hate hat off and put my political science hat on and think sensibly. These tea party events are protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. It states that "Congress shall make no law... abridging the right of the people peaceably to assemble". That goes for you and me. The Constitution is silent about the merits of assembling. The reason behind assembling doesn't have to be rational or intelligible or "smart". The assembled persons require no education. They can be ignorant in every way. Nothing stands in the way of the right of humans in the United States to assemble. I can't modify that right without dipping my toe in the water of despotism.
These people aren't completely without principle though. Regardless of what they say about "taxes" and "big government", their principle is "angry". In this sense, I'm not so different from the tea-baggers. We're all mad and we don't like what we see. No one likes to bailout banks and give their executives big bonuses. No one likes enormous debt. The tea-baggers and I are actually observing the same country, in peril. However, we are angry about fundamentally different things. I heard this little exchange on the radio:
Reporter: Why are you holding that sign?
Tea-bagger: I think he's a fascist.
Reporter: Why?
Tea-bagger: Because he is.
That doesn't make me angry at all.
The man with that "fascist" Obama sign didn't know what fascism was. He knew the word, and that it meant something bad, and that was good enough for him. The funny thing about all of this is that I think I now understand how all those righties felt after 9/11. Sometime around, say the next day, many persons of my political leanings were back to normal. Meanwhile all I kept hearing was "nothing will ever be the same". Everything was the same for me on 9/12. I thought the war on terror was stupid because we could never win a war against a tactic. I felt no urge to "strike back". I thought going into Afghanistan was a disaster waiting to happen. Unsurprisingly, I was against Iraq altogether. The NSA surveillance programs, harsh interrogation, and re-interpreting the Geneva Convention regarding the treatment of prisoners of war were abominations to me. I didn't think there was a threat after 9/11. There was a fairly significant threat on 9/10, but 9/12? Not so much. I wasn't the only person who thought these things. My like was referred to as "traitor" and "unpatriotic" by many on the right who were seemingly confounded that the Bush Administration was criticized.
Now, I look at the situation with the economy and it confounds me that those right wingers don't take it seriously. Unemployment is higher than it's been in 30 years. Our financial system nearly broke entirely. If the banks had all crashed it would have hit everyone. Yet, the tea-baggers don't think there is a crisis. They don't believe it. They think the crisis is a hoax so that liberals can institute "socialism" or "communism" or "fascism", etc... I think we're in the midst of one of the largest national emergencies this county has ever faced, but my right-leaning fellow countrymen are cheesed off about taxes, even though a tax cut was just enacted.
These views are diametrically opposed. We're all angry, but our sense about what is important is completely different. It's not a matter of one side being right or wrong. It doesn't matter because everyone is allowed to be heard (and vote), if they choose. Again, there aren't any requirements to do those things. They are "rights". What is sort of alarming is that we see the world in such different ways. I don't care that much about terrorism. Tea-baggers don't care about losing their health care. That is a core psychological difference. I don't know how we'll survive as a country when our differences are so vast. My guess is that only anger is holding us together.
Labels: politics
2 Comments:
I had a thought after reading this post this morning about these teabagging parties in relation to the Boston Tea Party. The anger that arose at the time the colonists dumped the tea into the harbor, and generally in the time leading up to the revolution, was caused in part because the colonists had developed a sort of new American identity separate from their identity as British subjects.
So, if these teabaggers are really comparable to the revolutionary colonists, they might as well just leave, because they are not Americans anymore (just as the colonists were not British anymore.) These people are afraid because America is changing, and has been changing for fifty years, in ways they simply can't understand. The old America to which they belong, the America of the white male power structure, is already dying. These really are diametrically opposed worldviews that can never be reconciled.
"Taxation Without Representation" was the rallying cry of the Boston Tea Party. British Parliament imposed a tax on imported tea as a form of kickback to the East India Tea Company. That put Americans and other importers at a disadvantage. However, while the beef was commercial in origin, the larger point they were making was that they weren't represented by Parliament. They had no representation. That issue was settled in 1789. The chosen symbolism of "Tea Party" depends upon lack of knowledge about American History, and there is plenty of that. I guess since those people misunderstood the Boston Tea Party, then they were simply making a pseudo-secessionist argument. Too bad they don't all live in the same place.
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