Stoopid Stuff

Graeme Frost Nipping at Your Conscience

As near as I can tell, the Right's argument here, the reason they are so viciously attacking a badly injured 12 year old child, is not exactly about government providing support and care to those citizens who are in need. No, they are gleefully gathered together in a gang mugging of a family that truly represents all the best American values, you know, the ones so often espoused and held up by the Right as "Heartland America" because they feel that family didn't deserve the benefits of the SCHIP program.

If only they had been more clearly destitute, perhaps homeless, on welfare, food stamps, perhaps if the father, instead of working for a living, was in prison, the mother a drug addict, perhaps then their children might have deserved the largess of the people's tax dollars. Honestly, the intellectual dishonesty and logical inconsistency of the arguments provided by the American political Right gives me a headache.

Do everything they demand, live a particular kind of life in a particular kind of way, according to the gospel of Coulter and Goldberg and if you come up wanting, if your life spins suddenly out of control, if your children unpredictably have desperate needs you simply cannot provide, tough. You must spend all of your life's accumulated assets, your home, your car, the very things you will need even more when the crisis passes. If, however, you are all the things these very so-called "conservatives" rail against, if you live your life in a manner of which they not only do not approve, but feel strongly you should be subject to legal and social sanctions due to your lifestyle, well then, please, feel free to accept the benefits of a social safety net provided by government and taxpayers.

How does this make sense? What are they serving, what goals do they seek, except to be against anything that Bush is against, anything that their most hated natural enemy, "Liberals", might be in favor of?

Here's the real question. And I do not pose it to them, for in their case I already know the answer. It's the source of that queasy feeling in my stomach. But it's critically important that the rest of us see this, and similar questions from capital punishment to universal health care, framed in these terms.

The question is about us. America, and the citizenry that not just inhabits, but constitutes and informs the ideas and ideals that ARE America. Who are we? What do we believe? What kind of society do we want to have? And if you believe, as the polling numbers tell us so many do, that America is moving in the wrong direction, if you think that that a cold, uncaring, Randian, corporatist authoritarian theocracy is exactly NOT what America should be aspiring to, if you believe that a majority of our collective money should be used to improve the lives of Americans, to lift up the powerless and protect the vulnerable, instead of being used to create and deploy the machines of death and domination, then you likely have no issue whatsoever with some tax dollars being used to save and then rehabilitate the lives of the Frost children.

Honestly. Read the front page of your newspaper tomorrow, then ask yourself "How did we get here?" How did we run so far off the rails? What is this place where killing on an industrial scale is "honorable" and trying to help the least among us is "weakness"? And what does it say about us, that in order to make a political/economic point, a large segment of our society is willing to attack, smear and if possible destroy a family just like theirs?

Ultimately, sadly, it's about fear. Fear of the other, slavishly devoted to an authoritarian government's need for an external enemy to provide the excuse for their abrogation of the Constitution in order that power be concentrated in the hands of the wealthy elite. Fear of Muslims, of Mexicans, of Homeless, of Blacks and Jews and even Graeme Frost, fear that he might be getting something and that in the process you might just be deprived of something. When you can demonize a badly injured child, you can easily convince your ideological fellow travelers that in order for Graeme Frost to "win", you have to lose. Once you give away your soul, you have no good way to navigate back to your humanity.

Wild Bill Yeats saw it coming, quite clearly:

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

It's a long time since we saw the shore, here, but it's time for a mutiny. It's time for us, people, American people, not "liberals" or "conservatives", just people, to stand up and say no more. No more hate. No more unnecessary war. No more squandering our wealth on weapons and the foreign adventures they empower. Let's take care of each other, and be proud when we do...

posted by mikey @ 12:22 PM