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RACISM AND THE WIN - LOSE MENTALITY
04/16/2010
The tea party crowd espouses so many different causes that it makes me suspicious about their real motives. At the very least, their words and behavior reflect enormous contradictions. And at the most, they show deliberate dishonesty.
At first, the teapartiers were supposedly opposed to health care reform. Sarah Palin, the megalomaniac sociopath, convinced them that something was in the bill when it most definitely wasn’t. She told them there were death panels and the government was coming to get Granny. (I’m convinced she perpetrated this destructive and vicious lie because her loss as the republican VP candidate humiliated her, and she wants revenge against Obama. Her running mate certainly does. He’s taking his ball and bat and going home, refusing to cooperate with the administration on anything.)
At the same time that the teapartiers were shouting down any government involvement with health care, they were demanding government not touch their Medicare, which of course is a government run program that has done everything it can to keep Granny going. Do the people screaming “Keep the government’s hands off my Medicare” not see this obvious contradiction?
The equally sociopathic Michelle Bachmann speaks at tea party rallies and whips up the crowd about things no one - not a single democrat or republican - has ever questionned: the census. She also loves to scream that she and her fellow republicans are going to take the country back, which is humorous and seditious all at the same time as she is implying that the 53% of the people who voted for Obama somehow stole the country. In other words, democracy has stolen the country; the people have stolen the country. So she wants to take the country back from the people? How do you do that--with a dictator, with a militia? What she really means, of course, is that she and her all-white tea party crowd want to take the country back from the black president. They want it back in the hands of white people.
There are other complaints, none of which have any merit: the government is coming for your guns; the bank bailout increased the debt; the stimulus package has done no good.
Now the teapartiers have their panties in a twist about taxes, though the taxes most Americans paid this year were the lowest in 50 years, thanks to the tax cuts included in the stimulus package. The crowd that gathered in Washington on tax day, when confronted with this contradiction, brushed it aside and said they’re concerned about the budget deficit and the national debt. Now what’s particularly amusing and sad about this is that these same people did not protest for the eight years Bush was in office, when he was enacting disastrous fiscal policies that nearly bankrupted our country and sent us into a second depression. They didn’t scream and yell about the unaffordable tax cuts and the two wars that exploded the national debt. They didn’t scream about a Medicare prescription drug law that, unlike Obama’s health care law, wasn’t paid for. What do they say when you point this out to them? Well, Bush was bad, but Obama is worse, forgetting of course that Obama must clean up the mess Bush left behind, and that costs money.
The Palin-Bachmann duo of lunacy is also doing more lip-flapping about the president being un-American or having un-American ideas, which always gets the crowd going. Republicans and conservatives are always obsessed with treason. This gives us the biggest hint about what really fuels the tea party movement.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s all about race. It’s disguised, though not well if you study the signs at the rallies, but it’s there, and I want to explain how it works, and how I’m convinced that’s what’s going on with a large number of the participants in this movement.
As a psychotherapist, I’m an observer of human nature. And I’ve learned that, unless you are enlightened, unless you work hard against it, your human nature is likely to lead you to characterize most things in terms of winning and losing.
Consider a husband and wife who are fighting over something important. They are at an impasse. Unless they are skilled in conflict resolution or have extraordinary good will towards each other, they are likely to see every argument as a win-lose situation. If she gives in and he gets his way, she will have lost and feel resentful. The next time they argue, she may work harder to win, feeling that she has to even things out, that she can’t let him win because it means she loses--again.
The women’s movement shows us another example, on a larger scale, of the animosity that can develop between the sexes when there’s a perception of win-lose. When women began to chafe against the stereotyped roles and second class status they had been relegated to for millennia, they rose up and said “enough.” Immediately a large segment of men saw this as a threat. Instead of working to share responsibility and power, and welcome one half of the wisdom of the world to the decisions that humans must make, many men saw it as a potential loss. If women got equal pay, entered into the labor market in bigger numbers, and asserted themselves, men would lose. Of course, it hasn’t worked out this way, and women still don’t have equal pay, but to many men, women winning something meant they would lose. And so there has been a huge backlash. Anyone who doubts that should remember the confirmation hearings of Sonia Sotomayor.
We see the win-lose mentality in so many areas of life, one of which is the controversy over global warming and climate change. Environmentalists want humans to treat the planet more gently, with more respect, and they have valid scientific evidence to prove destructive change is happening. But oil companies, certain politicians, and lovers of big gas-guzzling cars think that if the environmentalists are able to change the laws to mandate a reduction in carbon emissions, they will lose. They don’t see this as a chance for everyone to win. New technologies can arise. We can eliminate our dependence on Arab countries and stop going to war to protect the oil supply. Our children can breathe healthier air and we can preserve the most beautiful places on the planet. No, they see the issue in terms of win-lose. If the environmentalists win, gas will cost more, oil companies won’t make gazillions of dollars, and cars won't be behemoths.
Now let’s look at the situation in terms of win-lose with respect to the tea partiers. If you look at the signs held by many participants, depicting Obama as a witch doctor, or Hitler, or the joker (which looks very much like a black person in white face) you see the contempt for the man in clearly race tinged terms. What’s even more troubling, though, is that the contempt is based on obvious lies, distortions, and misinformation. If we have contempt for someone and it is easily proven that we are wrong, that our views are misinformed, but we hold onto them anyway, then our views are just an excuse for hating that person. There is some other reason for the tea partiers hatred of Obama. And that reason is that Obama is black.
Look at the vast majority of the tea partiers. They are white, middle-aged, and mostly male. They are used to being at the top. They are used to calling the shots, running the government, businesses, and churches. They may have been forced to accept - because of a war and civil rights legislation - that African Americans are citizens who have the right to vote, but that doesn’t mean they were ready for one to become president. And what they are deathly afraid of is that if Obama wins, they lose. If a black person can not only become president, but be a successful president, then white people will lose their 275 year tradition of running the country. They can’t let that happen. They have to destroy Obama.
Some have tried to de-legitimize or annul his presidency by accusing him of being born outside the country. These “birthers” don’t even want him to remain in office for an entire term. Others recognize the legitimacy of the election, but want to be certain he fails and doesn't get a second term. Hence, Jim DeMint wishing for health care legislation to be Obama’s Waterloo, and Rush Limbaugh wanting him to fail. Why would anyone want the president to fail when his failure means the country fails? They can only want him to fail if they believe his success means they lose, and that’s exactly what they think. They hold onto the ridiculous notion that if Obama succeeds, black people succeed, and white people fail. And so the supposed grass roots movement, which in reality was started and continues to be funded by republican and conservative political organizations, is doing everything it can to spread misinformation about this administration and then defeat it.
It’s amazing how silent these same people were when we had a failed presidency just a few years ago. With a record deficit, an economic meltdown, laws not paid for, and two disastrous and unnecessary wars that are still going on, it couldn’t have gotten much worse than it did under Bush. But none of these misguided tea partiers marched against the former president. Now we have a president who is highly intelligent, moderate in political philosophy and has been largely successful in accomplishing the things he campaigned on, and a group of white Americans is panicking.
Let’s be honest about the Obama presidency:
The health care bill is not a government takeover. It’s a continuation of our private, for-profit insurance industry, creating 30 million additional customers.
Obama has not raised taxes; he’s lowered them.
The stimulus package is working.
The bank bailout is actually making money for the government, and thus returning the taxpayers’ money to the treasury. And Wall Street is back in business, making money for millions of people with 401K’s.
The census is not a way to round up citizens and put them in camps; it’s something the government does every ten years--EVERY TEN YEARS NO MATTER WHO IS PRESIDENT.
No one is taking guns away.
There is no way to deny it. It may be unconscious. It may be disguised. But it’s all about race. Just check out the facts about Obama’s record and contrast it with tea party rhetoric. And then look at the signs in the crowd.
All content © 2005 outragedcitizen.com
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