Friday, October 14, 2011

Email: A sorry underbelly of America revealed here

That 13-year-old girl's mother is not raising her right at all. She's raising her to be smug, judgmental, bigoted, and hopelessly uninformed. In short: she's going to make a lovely mean girl in high school.
Amazing how the truly bitter people mindlessly weigh in with knee-jerk responses about these protesters with the usual buzzwords for babies ("communists," "socialists," "hippie," "lazy"): the predictable babble of people too full of themselves and too small-minded to pick up a newspaper or a book or watch something other than Fox news. They really have no idea (or interest in knowing) what is happening to their fellow Americans or their own democracy. They are, in fact, deeply unworthy of their democracy, because they will not stand up for it.

Sadly, they are too afraid to see what is happening, too afraid to think critically, too afraid someone might take their blinders off of them and expose them to the real world--a world in which hard work and a good education cannot overcome the outsourcing, downsizing, and outright theft of hardworking people's property and money to benefit a tiny handful of people who do not even create businesses or jobs or useful products or medical breakthroughs. The complainers like this 13-year-old girl don't understand greed. They blither about "communist redistribution of wealth" while Goldman Sachs and B of A redistribute that very wealth unearned into their own coffers. Lowbrow thinkers never notice these things. Too subtle. Requires inquiry and doubt. And why think when Rush does it for you?

Seeing the world as it is can be frightening and painful, so the derision you see in that girl's angry little sign and in the posts supporting her is born of extraordinary cowardice. Great moral cowardice. The cowardice of people too afraid to be mature adults and courageous citizens.

WWII vets are march on the streets. Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan vets are marching with those young people. Are you mocking them, too, young lady? Nurses are marching. Librarians. Teachers. Steelworkers. Cancer patients. Homeless families. Artists. Scientists and economists. The best and the brightest a nation can produce. They are out to change a thoroughly corrupt system, and it scares the nose-thumbing bystanders silly. Better to make fun of them, because grasping that the marchers could be right is too terrifying to contemplate. And contemplation is not in their skill set.

The ones who fall within the lower 53 percentile of emotional and intellectual IQs sneer because it is easy. And the sorry mob that makes fun of them hasn't a clue what those marchers stand for and who they represent. Most who mock are too stupid, apparently, to realize that those people are marching for them and their futures as well as their own. Mockers can't comprehend something greater than self-interest. And it's irrational self-interest, but they have no idea how they are setting themselves up for failure--failed careers, failed retirements, failed medical care, failed futures. Nobody will care about degrees in biology or computer engineering, because those jobs have been outsourced and downsized, too.
History has proved time and again that sorry comments like these can be found in opposition to every major social movement that has separated good from evil, from abolition to Indian independence to the end of apartheid to the march for civil rights. And those think like this 13-year-old, they pat themselves on the backs as the "true Americans," just like the "good Germans" who become the dupes of the Nazis--killing their neighbors, losing their loved ones in a war that was a horrific lie in response to an economic downturn, starving, suffering mass rape and murder at the hands of the Soviets. All because they wouldn't leave their self-congratulating comfort zones. The standard-bearers of these jeering yahoos become John Wilkes Booth or James Earl Ray or Nathuram Binayak Godse. They become Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot. They become the people who pilloried and spat upon Jesus Christ on the road to Golgotha. They become the Romans who put the spear in his side. As always, the haters never learn from history. In fact, they usually never read it. That would be indulging in "bitter women's studies."
Therefore, this note is for the blind jackasses, like this 13-year-old brat, those who are laughing at the sighted. They are a disgrace to every soldier who has died to protect them, every teacher who taught them a life skill, every person who was beaten or perished on a picket line or in a march so that they could have safe workplaces, clean water and food, safe medicines, access to a drink at a water fountain without someone standing in their way because of the color of their skin. Again, they are babies. And the whining we hear from them means the lower 53 percentile needs a diaper change. And a time out until they learn some history. They can have their pacifiers back when they learn some compassion.

So, before you bloviate at someone who is struggling for the rights and economic dignity of Americans everywhere, why don't you get off your lazy ass, get out of your too-narrow comfort zone, toss out the check-stand tabloids, unplug the "Real Housewives" shows, shut off the hate radio, and become a human being. A real one. Not a self-centered meat sack with an undeserved chip on its shoulder.
Consider this your wake-up call. History never judges such hateful attitudes kindly. Think of this 13-year-old with her mean-girl hissy fit as the antithesis of Anne Frank. That's what she is. Shame on her. Shame on all of you who egg her on.