My friend, the poet, scholar, and citizen, Hilton Obenzinger ju
My friend, the poet, scholar, and citizen, Hilton Obenzinger just put this piece into the air waves. Strikes a chord with, and hope with you, too: & share it with your neighbors in the USA (and from all I hear you might include Italian friends as well!)
Meditations in a Time of Delusions and
Lies – 30
Stop the Lynch Mob: We Need the Real
Deal
September
13, 2009
Hilton Obenzinger
Birthers,
deathers, tenthers, gunners, lifers, Foxers, secessionists, and all the rest of
these extremists believe their America has gotten stolen out from under them.
Stolen right before their very eyes by the crazy fact of an election!
Let’s
not give it back.
But
they’re getting frantic, and dangerous, egged on by demagogues like Glenn
Beck. Their antics during the town halls and after have increasingly taken on
the smell of a lynch mob. A white congressman from South Carolina, a protégé
of Strom Thurman and a member of a pro-Confederacy organization, insults the
president during his health care joint session of Congress; then the
Republicans rebut Obama’s speech from, of all places, the Strom Thurmond
Room in the Capital.
No one
needs a degree in semiotics to read these signs.
A
black man is in the White House, someone who actually has brains, knows how to
speak, and believes he can make government serve the people. It’s too
much for these people to bear – Strom Thurmond and all the old
segregationists are rolling in their graves.
A lot
of people are seeing this and describing it the same way, not just paranoid
leftists like me. Here’s Joe Klein, writing in his blog for the
eminently mainstream Time: “Could
I just say that the intensity of this is getting pretty scary… and
dangerous? We are heading toward a cliff and the usual brakes of civil
discourse are not working. Indeed, the Republicans have the pedal to the metal…
I have a sinking feeling about where we’re headed now. I hope I’m
wrong.”
So how do you head off a lynch mob? Mark Twain said all it
took was one brave man to turn a crazed mob around, just one to stand up to
tell the frothing crowd that they’re all fools and they should just go
home. That’s all it would take. One person who stares down the
blood-lust, who says enough is enough, and as a result the crowd snaps out of
its trance.
I hate to tell you this, but that one person is you –
and me.
We’re just going to have stand in front of a crowd of
rabid birthers and tell them to go home. All of us need to stand up. Everyone who supported Obama, all of the progressive activists and
organizations, civil rights, women’s, environmentalist groups, churches
– everyone. And that includes those few Republicans who reject the
extreme right – even those conservatives who criticize Obama but do not
succumb to the fringe hysteria.
This is the time to call for decency and basic democratic
rights – from everyone. Now before it’s too late, before the
violence grows even more, before . . . well, you get the idea.
But
where is it? Opposition to the growing fascist trend can’t be left only
to wisecracks by Jon Stewart and Bill Maher or to rallies organized by the
White House. What’s going on?
The
problem is that a lot of progressives have their own criticisms of Obama. He
called for a freeze of Israeli settlements – unprecedented – but
many believe it’s not enough. He’s starting negotiations with Iran
but he’s expanding the war in Afghanistan. He pumps stimulus into the
economy but he seems to coddle Wall Street. He supports gay rights but wavers
on gays in the military. He calls for health care reform but steers away from the
single-payer system and seems even to be willing to abandon the “public
option.” Obama concedes too much, he accommodates the right too much,
he’s too moderate, he’s too nice, he doesn’t fight enough.
Stop!
Obama’s not a radical, not a revolutionary, and certainly not a
socialist. But the fact is that the ultra-right and the sector of the ruling
class represented by Cheney-Palin think he is. He’s shifting the
direction of America in small but important ways, and once you start to think
about change all sorts of things could happen. And these rightwing extremists
know it, even if the left doesn’t.
It’s
laughable. Except they got guns.
So
progressives, liberals and all decent people have to do something they’re
not used doing and haven’t been really good at. We need to learn the
art of how to support and pressure at the same time. That sounds like
walking backwards and forwards without falling down. But no matter our
position on issues, no matter our criticisms, we need to defend the president
and his administration. For a lot of folks, this is uncharted territory. How
to voice critical support? But we risk losing all of our democratic rights,
and the possibilities of more change, if we don’t learn.
I
don’t have much connection with coalitions and organizations, but if you
do, start talking on all levels, local to national, talk to friends, talk to
everyone. We need to activate, participate, and demonstrate.
In the
tradition of a true crank, I’ll even volunteer a name for the
mobilization: The Real Deal. FDR had his New Deal, Truman tried his Fair Deal
– now we need a Real Deal, one that deals with reality and the new
America of many peoples, races, religions, ideas.
Are
you ready to stare down a lynch mob?
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