A Growing Hysteria

"As Katy Abram told Fox News after passionately confronting Specter: “I know that years down the road, I don’t want my children coming to me and asking me, ‘Mom, why didn’t you do anything? Why do we have to wait in line for, I don’t know, toilet paper or anything?’ ”

Besides the chilling prospect of 21st-century America morphing into a cold war state — with Sheryl Crow in charge of toilet-paper rationing — there are also delusional fears about the government tapping bank accounts and convening “death panels,” as Sarah Palin dubbed them, to exploit the cost-saving potential of euthanizing the old and disabled.

At his more placid town hall in Portsmouth, N.H., on Tuesday, the president had to explain that he did not intend to “pull the plug on grandma.” He said that the specter of death panels had spun out of a proposal from a Republican, Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia, who has long espoused helping Medicare patients learn about options for care at the end of their lives. In an interview with The Washington Post on Monday, Isakson diagnosed Palin’s interpretation of his suggestion as “nuts.”"  Maureen Dowd

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It seems to be in the air, blowing around like a viral infection in a Stephen King novel, "something wicked this way comes..."  The temptation is strong to think that the shaky voices, incoherence and shrillness are products of the summer weather, but...

I think that the problem is actually best heard in sobbed statements like "...I want my America back...," and   "This country is being systematically disassembled to make a different country..."  These words were spoken yesterday by blonde women at public meetings.

The people who voted against Obama and who insist that he is "the other" are afraid.  They are afraid that this president really does intend systemic change in American society, a redistribution of privilege and benefits and power that will end the domination of the country by white people.  Feeding their inchoate fears are the "projections" that are made by media babblers that white people will be a minority in the US in fifty years or so.  These projections are usually self-serving and based on the assumption that in fifty years it will still be valid to try to characterize people in this way by race.  Look around you.  Do you not see young America evolving away from this primitive notion of race?

From this fear of the loss of power over their environment comes many evils.  The "birthers" are a good example.  Their absurd insistence about Obama's supposed Kenyan birth is merely a screen for their terror of someone they see as an alien black revolutionary.  They don't care where he was born.  They simply do not want him.  They see his policies as steps toward a future that they reject.

"Whose country is this?"  John Wilkes Booth wrote those words in his day book while hiding in the Maryland woods, nursing a broken leg.  The day before he shot Lincoln, Booth stood in a crowd and heard the president say something that indicated that freed blacks would have to be citizens.  Booth then said to one of his men, "That means votes for n-----s.  Now I'll put him through."  That seems to have been the moment of decision for murder.

People should take a step back and then walk away from the hysterics and the media demagogues before the situation deteriorates further. 

Things are going very wrong in this country.  "The center does not hold."  pl

 

Comments

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[Binh]

I was stunned to see people bearing arms, including an assault rifle, outside the town hall out West. I'm all for habeaus corpus, but when people do things like this, my first instinct is to arrest and detain first, ask questions later. No one should be allowed anywhere near Obama with a weapon.

Nothing like that ever happened under Bush, even though his approval rating ended in the 30s. I wonder if a repeat of the Oklahoma bombing is on the cards (God forbid)?