Michael Tomasky: Obama, Beck and America

[arenean]

From The Guardian:

Michael Tomasky: Obama, Beck and America

<snip>

...Then a woman I didn't know spoke up. She was southern. She was very friendly and chatty. She said she was all for beloved communities. But what was clear to her, the really important point, was that in the good old days, those communities had nothing to do with government. And when we started thinking it did was when it all went wrong. It was a small group, so I was polite and didn't say anything, but what I thought was: you idiotic, irresponsible, egotistical cretin. Nothing to do with government? Let's go ask the black people of your age cohort and home town whether they felt part of a beloved community, and let's ask them whether they think government had anything to do with the change in their status in your community over the decades. It's just incomprehensible to me that a person could be so thoroughly incapable of stepping outside her own shoes and seeing big questions from others' vantage points. I mean it's genuinely beyond my comprehension. I can assure you that in America, black people – yes, even today, when discrimination isn't remotely like it was – have little choice but to consider the big matters from the white point of view.

I mostly avoided the Beckathon on Saturday, but to the extent that I read about it, I thought of that dinner. This woman was undoubtedly sincere. Beck's attendees were undoubtedly sincere. They believe government strangles their liberty. I guess they really believe, as Beck put it, that "we are on the side of individual freedoms and liberties and, damn it, we will reclaim the civil rights movement."

The two problems here are, first, that while they think they owe government nothing, they actually owe government a great deal. If they're small business people, they depend on the freight rails and the roadways and the utilities and the regulation of interstate commerce and the laws that keep their crooked competitors from undercutting them and the courts' abilities to enforce those laws. Without question the government is an annoyance in their lives in dozens of ways. But they don't see any of the good, only the bad. If you tote it up, the government helps them a lot more than it hurts them, and if they think not, let them go open a hardware store in downtown Mogadishu and see how that works out.

[secondwind]

1. Empathy is not in their vocabulary. I know this sounds trite, but it's the word

that comes to mind over and over and over again when I see/hear idiotic statements from Teabagger-Christian-types

[Hawkowl]

2. I love the last sentence

Why don't you try and open a hardware store in Mogadishu....? HA!