Who We Were Before We Woke Up
I was deeply saddened by
two moments from the recent Republican
Party debates: The first, the audience's spontaneous applause when a
moderator sited 200 plus executions in the state of Texas during Governor
Perry's tenure. The second, when a member of the audience shouted
"Yeah!", followed by light applause, in response to a question asking
whether a critically ill person without health insurance should be left to die.
Is this behavior
representative of that many people in this country?
Is this representative
one of our two major political parties? It smacks of the kind of mob
mentality you'd expect at a Black Panther rally, or the KKK, not the political
organization that's controlled the White House for most of the last 30 years.
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| Ron Paul during one of the debates |
When you throw in the specter
of Michele Bachman suggesting that HPV vaccinations for adolescent girls in
Texas is something to reject and fear and Sarah Palin opens her mouth to say
just about anything, I have to wonder how the Republican party can survive with
any credibility in this country and the world.
Underlying this movement
is the sense that the Republican Party is for those who view the world in terms
of "us against them". And the concept that "if one person is
suffering, it affects us all" must sound as foreign and threatening as
cockpit audio from a 9/11 highjacker.
Lest I become that which
I’m criticizing, let me say we are all, including the suffering souls in the
debate audience, desirous of the same basic stuff: happiness, freedom, food,
roof over our head, the chance for our children to have the same. We all do
battle with the great satin: fear, the 21st century plague fueled by
those who exploit it for monetary or egotistical gain. Fear’s toxic consequence
is suspicion of others, a turning inward to protect, a fortification of
personal boundaries. And when that happens people behave insanely, in
opposition to their own best interests. Kind of like what’s happening in
America today.
I hope that as more of us
continue to look inward, reflect on our brief tenure in this thing called life,
that compassion grows. Being the optimist that I am, I think we may be near the
bottom of one of the cycles in human evolution. And that as we emerge from the
shock that is this huge shift in our economic and technological way of life, we
look back on forums like the Republican debates and realize how desperately enmeshed
in the labyrinth of our own nightmares we were before we woke up.
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