It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times. . . .

Tags

American Militia groups, History, insurrection, red state/blue state, revolution, right wing extremism, violence

If you keep up even minimally on what’s happening politically today, surely you have heard the remark, “I’ve never witnessed so much hatred and division as exists in America today.”

Just as surely you can point to myriad of examples of violent, threatening, ugly rhetoric, often offered by people who, we would like to think, are mature and thoughtful people. They are now people who claim leadership in our land.

Teabaggers spat up and spewed racial and homophobic epithets against members of Congress whom they disagreed with on health care. Plenty of right wing sites are urging civil disobedience in the form of vandalism against politicians who don’t follow their ideology. Sarah Palin urges followers to “reload” and provides a map with targeted Democrats in the next election, all artfully defined by being real targets with cross hairs.

There is much to be said for claiming that something terribly wrong is afoot in America. It perhaps is time to step back and assess this claim.

If we broaden the horizon just a bit to include the greater world we live in and take a long long perspective, we can see that over time we have progressed in what we consider ethical and just. We need not go back that many centuries before we find life for the vast majority, mean, hard, and short. Life was lost with such regularity that it came to be the norm. We are all shocked when we see the numbers who died of plagues. We count it a disaster when a few thousand die, nowhere do we contemplate losing 1/3  or 1/2 of a city’s population.

So progress we have. We have (exception to Texas and other’s who murder with lust still) largely moved away from execution, and from things like torture (exception Bushites and other neo-cons who find this stuff “necessary”). We step by step reflect a country and a world that feels some responsibility to feed, house, clothe, and otherwise care for each other.

I said step by step, and surely many of us decry that we are so slow. Progress is uneven, here, as elsewhere. We are deeply shamed to find many many countries far ahead of us in social care of its citizenry.

Looking at this country alone, we can find numerous examples of when we were “ugly” and vile. We rioted, and we warred and we insurrected against tyranny. Could we have been more divided as when we debated and urged, coerced and cajoled our fellow citizens into armed insurrection against the British?

How about when we, without much thought at all, decimated the American Indian population? No doubt there was opposition to such inhuman treatment of others. We brought slavery into our land and created such a split in our people that a war ensued that took tens of thousands of lives and forever scarred the emotional psyche of this nation.

We interred Japanese, we abused and used new immigrants to this land, we abused the poor who fled the dust bowl of the Midwest in the thirties. We hounded perfectly good Americans because of supposed ties to Communism. We hung blacks from trees in protest of their being treated as full citizens. The list is nearly endless. We have not even begun to explore the genocides/tyrannies we allowed/helped/encouraged in foreign lands, all in pursuit of our “national” interest.

Yet, I have no doubt that there was strong opposition to all these policies and behaviors. With some it was self-evident such as the Civil and Revolutionary wars. The turmoil that ensued  during the civil rights era points this out dramatically. Who can forget the use of national reserve units to preserve the peace against lawless “police” in the South?  Talk about ugly times!

All of this is not to say that we can ignore what is happened before our eyes today. It is dangerous and bears careful vigilant watching. Rhetoric will sooner or later turn to violent acts on the part of some. But this has happened in the past, and we as a nation, I believe fundamentally reject these “solutions.”

We can talk the talk, but we are not really prepared (most of us anyway) to walk that walk. We are not prepared to pick up guns and fight in the streets. More important, we are not disposed to allow others to do it either. I predict that at the first real evidence of racial/sexual/ethnic violence that appears organized, this country will respond with abject horror and revulsion.

A Republican strategist suggested yesterday that what was supposed to be Obama’s Waterloo, has turned into the Republican Waterloo. They put all their eggs in one basket–kill the bill. They failed, and now, they have nothing to show but total irrelevancy. They are more and more tying themselves to this threatening movement of malcontents, motivated by a dozen or more individual gripes.

When one of these groups explodes, the Republicans will self-emulate. They will look shocked, panic, and swear they never intended any of this. But their failure to step in and disassociate themselves from such ugly speak will forever paint them as the party of violent extremism.

And, finally we will turn out those among us who hate and use hate to gain political power and advantage. The Bachmanns, the Kings, the Tancredos, the Inhofes, the DeMitts, all of them, gone in a funeral pyre of outrage that they actually let it happen.

People will simply turn away, shaking their heads in disgust–“this is not what we meant” they will say. And those of us who saw this coming? We will hold our tongues as our brothers and sisters return to sanity–those that do, and we will sit down and begin the business of governing once more. The rest? The teabaggers and other militant militia types? Why they will be dead or in jail, where they belong–because in the end, they are nothing but criminals who followed their natural inclinations, masking as patriots.

It will go down historically as another moment in time when America was inexplicably close to insanity. Somehow our better angels as Lincoln said, prevail. We shall to.

But keep your eyes open. Remain vigilant!