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A couple of weeks ago I was chillin' with some folks at a metal show in Brooklyn. I was chatting with a fellow music writer whom I greatly respect and as far as I can remember, I was telling her about my sudden fascination with the writer Cormac McCarthy. Having read The Road and at the time I had just started Blood Meridian, I was talking about my interest in the human condition. I said that it seemed as though human beings were only socially conditioned to act in a civil manner. That given the opportunity, humans would ravage, sodomize and kill each other in a heartbeat.
The writer (whom, again, I greatly admire and hoped that she liked me) looked at me as though I had just lost my mind.
However, by looking at the recent incidences at various Town Hall meetings in America, I think I was proven right. As a Canadian, living in a country where supposedly, our health care system is far superior than our southern neighbors, I cannot speak on the intricacies of the situation, I can only speak on what I have gathered, through watching countless hours of CNN and yes, reading blogs.
Thankfully, the disturbing observations I have had on what I have seen have been proven as somewhat accurate, most recently, through author Tim Wise's piece on CNN that was posted on Racialicious. Wise says that people, like the white dude who ripped up the picture of Rosa Parks that a black woman held in her hands - is not necessarily racist, "but there is a lot of background noise of the hostility that I think is about that I would call white racial resentment."
Wise discusses the above incident, noting that the majority white crowd applauded when the black protester was hauled off. Also, there were people in the crowd at the Missouri-based meeting that were carrying signs that called President Obama (yes the black man y'all voted for) a N@#ger. But, why, oh ye faithful readers, did race even become a factor in this dogfight?
And why are folks so pissed?
Well, the proposed heath care system looks at cutting the fat, the fat that doctors have been laying on thick for decades. As a doctor interviewed on CNN said quite recently, the majority of surgeries and medication that has been dolled out is 85% for aliments, that if Jim Bob got off his fat ass and put the cigarettes and the Thunderbird down and got on the treadmill, would be unnecessary. Basically, if people took care of themselves, the health care system would not be in the dire straits that it is in now.
But it also means that those who are currently paying for health care, might not get all the services they are paying big bucks for. More services would be given to low-income people and that has brought up the horrible, terrible S-word. Socialist.
And in this case, socialist=black people. After all, we are the ones who are uneducated, lazy, stupid and are always looking for handouts, right? Oh, and because your President happens to be half-black, means that the health care proposal means that he is secretly trying to revitalize the Black Panther movement! Hide your daughters! But wait a minute......he's Hitler! Yes, a biracial Hitler who will conspire with those Confederate-hatin' Liberals (umm, Democrats) to overthrow the good and pure white race!
Enough of my diatribe. You have to check out Jane Devlin's blog, where she discusses the recent events (where stupid idiots showed up at town Halls with guns) and ties them back to the gun debate:
Guns were not displayed for President Carter, who was far more liberal than Obama, and who led this country during a time of double-digit inflation, high interest rates, and oil shortages. Nor were they brought out for President Clinton, even while the right-wing was working very hard to have him impeached. And even when the majority of the country disagreed with the war in Iraq, no one brought guns to the protests. So I have to ask why now, why with Obama?
I am not a knee-jerk reactionary when it comes to issues of culture and race, but the arguments made by the mobs in defense of their atrocious behavior simply don’t wash. They seem to be using the issue of health care reform to express an anger that goes deeper than mere politics or philosophy, and there is a maliciousness to their public gun toting that goes far beyond debate and protest.
