We Have Nothing to Fear but Ignorance and Greed

 
I came across this YouTube video clip of a woman, a Tea Party Republican, being interviewed about President Obama. Her comments were shockingly commonplace among many conservative voters today. I hear these pronouncements from people I work with, friends and even some family members. I hear these same mantras over and over as if they came out of some “play book” for how to win at politics all costs.  I hear the conservative political pundits in the media, most notably on FOX News, spewing these same lines with the zeal of a preacher to a congregation shouting in unison, ”Amen!”

What is so frightening to me is that the woman in the video looks so “middle-of-the-road America.” She looks like a grandma, an elderly aunt, a solid citizen and yet her statements are so filled with fear and hate and outright…ignorance. I feel like I am witnessing the dumbing down of America. It is like some sci-fi movie plot where the hero realizes that all the people around him, people he knows and loves, are being transformed into “party line” spewing “zombies.” They are no longer able to think for themselves. They can only repeat the latest Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh revelations about Obama’s unfitness for office and why the wealthy must be protected at all costs from his attempts to tax them.

In this movie, Americans are being sucked into this big machine rolling across the country. It sends out waves of fear. It provides slogans to chant, signs to carry and big screen TV’s filled with talking heads, all bent on making Americans feel afraid. Democrats, liberals…and Obama are easy targets. “They” want to tax Americans and make them pay for government programs like Medicare and Social Security that will surely bankrupt America. (No one can really see who is driving the big machine with mirrored windows.) Banners and flags streaming from the machine call for smaller government, doing away with regulations for energy production, the environment and Wall Street. Leave the wealthy “job creators” alone! They must be free to “do their thing” for America’s economy to survive and recover. The wealth they amass will eventually trickle down to the masses. Get a job and stop being a drag on society. No compromise with “the Devil.” Make Obama a one term president… at all costs.

In its wake, the hero of the movie finds the most vulnerable of American society huddled in the wreckage of humanity, civility and cooperation. They were the sick and disabled, the homeless and people without jobs. They were old men and young, starving children with frightened single mothers. Some were illegal without any plan, except to survive. They were the huddled masses that once believed in the promise of America, but that promise had now been taken by American Fear and Greed.  A numbing ignorance hung over the land as the zombies marched on with the big machine. Taking back America!

Sleep well America. We are almost there…2012.

Food for THOUGHT…