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02/06/2010 Send this article to a friend Nine years ago, a no-nothing figurehead president, propped up by neoconservatives, evangelicals and Dick Cheney, came into office having no other agenda than to cut taxes and give to the wealthiest among us the surplus Bill Clinton had worked so hard to build up. He not only cut taxes, he fought two wars he didn’t pay for, and together with his Republican Congress, created the largest deficit in our nation’s history. And there was no populist outrage. Now mobs of mostly fifty, sixty and seventy year old citizens are marching with signs showing Barack Obama as Stalin, Hitler, the Joker, and a tribal witch doctor. These images are disrespectful, dishonest and often racist. While I understand that people are frustrated, many losing jobs and homes and wanting the government out of their lives, the signs and the language betray what is really going on, and why this is happening now, rather than two years ago, when George W. Bush was leading us into financial ruin. Let’s think of this another way. Imagine you go to a doctor for back pain. The doctor botches the surgery and you are worse off after the operation than you were before. And to make matters worse, the doctor and hospital still want to be paid. Your insurance doesn’t cover all of your treatment, so you are left with a $10,000 bill. You go to a second doctor who says you will need another operation, not just to correct the original problem, but also to repair the damage that was done to you by the first doctor. He says you will need months, if not years, of physical therapy to get you back to health, and all of the treatment will probably set you back another $15,000. You have the surgery, and at first, there is no improvement. The doctor warned you it would take time, but you are impatient. You have forgotten about the responsibility of the first doctor, as he has left the country to work in Europe on some research project, and so you direct all your anger at the second doctor. You blame him for how long it is taking to recover, and for not making you whole in just a few months. You can’t understand why your medical bills now amount to $25,000 and you blame the second doctor for the entire bill and for all your troubles. Would you actually do this – blame the second doctor for the entire problem? I don’t think so. If you are thinking clearly and acting rationally, you would know that the second doctor did not cause the problem, and you would understand that he had two jobs to do: fixing the original problem and repairing the damage done by the first doctor. You would give him some leeway. You would understand why it would take time to heal. But the tea partiers are impatient. They are not acting rationally. No matter how many economists try to explain to them that getting out of this hole will take both time and money, and that more will have to be spent to undo the Bush administration’s damage before we can go back to trying to reduce the deficit, they don’t get it. They blame Obama for the whole mess. So something else has to be going on, something not quite rational, on the one hand, and coldly calculating on the other. The irrational part is fueled by fear. The right wing leaders of this country know how to stoke fear in inattentive, susceptible citizens. Seven years of the Bush administration was a fear-stoking fest: fear of terrorists; fear of Saddam; fear of Iran; fear of Bin Laden; fear of immigrants; fear of politicians wanting to take away your guns. And it worked until 2008, when enough people rose up and showed that hope can overcome fear. But hope came in the person of a black man, and a large segment of white America had an entirely new fear. What would it mean to have a black man as president? Even my own late mother, a saintly, loving woman, asked me if I thought Obama might want to get even with white people for what the Southern slave owners had done. The legacy of slavery and racism runs deep in the country, as does the fear of black men. A majority of those white Americans at tea party rallies refuse to believe that Obama is an American citizen, or say they are not sure. Imagine – a large group of Americans are so conspiratorial, so afraid of a black president, that they have to create a scenario whereby he captured the presidency unlawfully. Never before has anyone questioned the birthplace of a president. But then, never before have we had a black president. If these citizens were sincere in their concerns about the deficit and the Constitution, and not just terrified of a black president, they would have risen up when George W. Bush was destroying the country. But there was nary a sound from them. Instead, they showed up at McPalin rallies and cheered when Palin claimed Obama was a terrorist. They had no concerns then about the economy or the Constitution, even though McPalin would have continued with Bush’s national security strategy of shredding the Constitution, and his fiscal policy of devastating the economy. Their concerns were related to the color of Obama's skin. "Terrorist" and "not a citizen" were code words for "not one of us." These people thrive on the adrenaline rush that fear offers. And they are susceptible to suggestion from their leaders, no matter how insane or irrational those suggestions are. So enter the cold, calculating power brokers who want the White House and Congress back, the right wing neocons who lust after war with Iran and the lucrative military-industrial contracts such a war would generate, and the corporatists, who want to control the country, and hoard the money. These power broker are clever people who know exactly what they are doing, and Sarah Palin is their perfect spokesmodel. It is Palin, after all, who started much of this nonsense in August with her “death panel” warning. Since then, she has fueled the fears of these people, adding to the hateful nonsense spewed by Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. I would feel sorry for these poor dupes if they weren’t so dangerous. The Democrats have their work cut out for them. Fear is a formidable enemy. If the Democrats and Obama don’t get back into the fighting spirit of the 2008 campaign, find a way to overcome the do-nothing Republicans in Congress, and prove they can solve some of the problems the country faces, they will be kicked out of office and we will have another lost decade, with corporations ruling the country, and more people losing homes, jobs and health insurance, as the wealthy get ever wealthier and the middle class disappears. All content © 2005 outragedcitizen.com |