I have said this and written it on this blog numerous times: RACISM IS A PSYCHIATRIC DISORDER!
And make no mistake - this is about race!
Health care reform is exactly meant to help the very Deliverance-type, rural, uneducated people that are donning Confederate caps and sporting neo-Nazi tatoos at the town halls, shouting down anyone and everyone they can. But the fear in these infant souls of a man with a different skin color is so great that it's a snap for the snakes and thieves and con artists of the tattered Republican Party to prey on them and let them make fools of themselves on national television.
Barack Obama is not white. And that scares the living crap out of these beer-bellied, red-neck illiterates. Think about it. Hating a skin color?! Why? Because the night is dark, and it's at night when the kids have nightmares? Really. Think about it. How disturbed do you have to be to hate someone because of their color?!
Health care reform is a given, folks. And the demise of the Republican Party is also a given. These are the death throws of a retrogressive era whose time has passed. This isn't a pendulum swing, this is a quantum, paradigm shift.
"After all, we aren't savages really." (William Golding, "Lord of the Flies," Ch. 11)READ THE STORY ABOUT THIS HERE!
If this is the face of anti-health care reform protest, the GOP has a serious problem. This GUY decided he was doing the Tea Party-anti-reform effort a real solid by hanging freshman Maryland Democratic Representative Frank Kratovil in effigy!POSTSCRIPT: HERE'S AN ARTICLE FROM THE WASHINGTON POST on why the "Birthers" hate having a black president!
Well, I don't disagree completely that there are some scared racists out there who simply want Obama to fail because he's black. But I don't necessarily think that they're the core of what you're coining the "Lord of the Flies re-enacters" at these town meetings. I think it was Jon Stewart who recently blew the cover off these "astro-turf roots" movements that have been disrupting these meetings recently. Apparently memos released from many an organization affiliated with the health care industry have been advocating the organization of groups of people who are told to go to these meetings, fill up as much of the front rows as possible to make it appear as though they're in the majority and literately shout out certain talking points in those memos without allowing any response. The effect being that it appears that everyone in these meetings, and thus the population as a whole, is vehemently against this health care reform.
ReplyDeleteIt's a pretty insidious tactic that unfortunately is gaining traction. However I'm just not sure that race in this particular case is the overriding "frightening factor" if you will. The Health Insurance industry's insistence that somehow we're all gonna' die if this plan goes through on the other hand is a much larger factor.
It is playing on the "fear of change" tactic, and granted Obama being a black man is one kind of change, so that certainly doesn't help. But I think if Hillary were in Obama's position the same exact thing would happen. Would that then be sexist? But if it were Joe Biden in Obama's position, again, the same thing would happen.
Then there's this; these same people that are disrupting these meetings, I could almost say for certain would have nothing but good things to say about Condoleeza Rice.
Ultimately I don't think this fear of Health Care Reform specifically is about racism, but about a serious fear of change. Which arguably is a lot worse.
The article in the Washington Post that you cite presents an interesting argument that one major aspect of this fear of change is a further equilibrium between the races in this country. Granted, but as you point out these people are such infant souls as you say, that I wouldn't doubt if these people would have just as much anxiety if they were forced to change from briefs to boxers. Ultimately change is change, you either embrace it or fear it.