To me, what's going on now in politics just feels like bullying. It's akin to the 1950's Committee on Unamerican Activities. The House and Senate majority leaders are saying that they now will only use Republicans to back bills and will simply ignore Democrats. In particular they are threatening to change the rules of the Congress to deny the Minority party any voice at all.
Bush personally is upping his level of personal attacks on our freedoms. I thought gay marriage was just a campaign tactic. Nope. Turns out Bush really hates gay people and he is going to try to write his prejudices into our Constitution. And he is lying at an unprecedented level because he knows that nobody is watching. He owns the Congress, he will soon own the Judiciary, and he owns the press.
Sadly, I don't think there will be any backlash. In the 50's we could ask if they had any decency. Now, instead of being outraged, the average American seems to love the fact that we used napalm and white phosphor in Fallujah. Seems to be 100% behind treating gays like criminals.
To me this all seems to extend from the attitudes of the players involved. You have Cheney using harshly excessive language on the floor of the Senate and getting away with it. You have the Republican keynote which is as vile vicious and angry as it gets. You have Fox news running around calling people sissies and traitors. Then there are websites like NewsMax and FreeRepublic which take all of that to an entirely new low. And the people love it. They love being intolerant. They love being ignorant. They love being insensitive. And paradoxically, they think that they are protecting civilization and civilized behavior.
Unfortunately this is how it's always been. The ones who get on the white hoods and go lynching are in the pews on Sunday, believing that they are defending the faith and the purity of their race and their country by resorting to extreme measures. When has the route to salvation ever gone through bigotry, intolerance, ignorance, bullying and extremism? What little I know of Jesus' teachings leads me to believe that these traits were antithetical to his philosophy.
Posted by jherr at December 2, 2004 08:58 AMThanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
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