The coming revolution?
Bookworm on Aug 09 2009 at 8:25 am | Filed under: Barack Obama
Bruce Kesler, one of the most levelheaded guys I know in the blogosphere, thinks we’re nearing a flashing point:
During the past week, I’ve had conversations with old friends – leftist, centrist, and conservative – with whom I experienced the political battles of the 1960’s. All of us have a similar take on what’s happening now, compared to then. Then, it was a challenge against authority primarily by the privileged young who didn’t want to serve in the war, which dissipated rapidly once the draft ended, while their ideologues took refuge in academia to rise to insulated tenure of attachment to their old slogans and some of their ilk to gerrymandered seniority in Congress. Obama was a tot then, but raised on their radical bromides. Now, it is the broader swath of working and middle class Americans, a far larger and more potent population, who are fed up and angry with being exploited and insulted by those who feel it their right and duty to impose their schemes to rearrange and endanger everyone else’s lives and weaken the America that sustains us. We all feel the potential for violence is high. Enough everyday Americans will defend themselves against thuggish attacks upon their right to speak out.
(Read the rest here.)
As for me, I see it on TV and I read it in the blogs, but I’m still having a hard time envisioning the flashpoint happening. Where I Iive, there is no time bomb waiting to explode. Instead, there is palpable torpor. Of course, I don’t live at the margins where red and blue meet. Obama won here by over 75%, and I’m not even looking over the Bay to Berkeley or San Francisco. I guess that’s why the good citizens are still lying in bed smoking their post-election cigarette and feeling the bliss. They haven’t yet figured out that, quite literally, they’ve been screwed.
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Books, our local unearned zillionaire (see, his mom and dad owned a little greeting card company that sold her goofy hippie poetry on fake parchment paper; they had the idea to do free on-line greeting cards; they sold that to Yahoo for a pile o’ money) Jared Polis, who bought himself a House seat this year, just had a town hall in Boulder and was overrun with elderly people who wanted to smack him around about the health care thing.
In Boulder.
Where they think Berkeley’s City Council is too right wing.
2010 will be an interesting election.
Book, I took in a Giants game yesterday with my friend, a very liberal psychologist, who is a great guy to pal around with as long as we avoid politics. He has drunk deeply of the Kool-Aid and I am too old to waste my time trying to lure him back to reality.
But something interesting happened yesterday. On the boat coming home from the game, he sneered about the “organized disrupters” and “mobs” that have been showing up at congressional town hall meetings, and snorted something about “believing that Obama’s healthcare proposal will deliberately target old people to die.” It was typical NPR and NYT blather, swallowed whole and with no critical thought or skepticism.
I gently said, “I know some of the people you are talking about and they are intelligent, civil professionals who are see vast problems with the scheme. The reason they’re raising their voices is that they think their congresspeople are stonewalling their concerns.”
He seemed willing to listen, so I continued with a couple of examples, telling him that my wife’s $240,000-per-year drug therapy for a rare genetic disorder would disappear under Obamacare. I pointed out that all socialized systems are simply rationing schemes, and that a bureaucrat faced with approving a $240,000 expenditure for a 64-year-old woman or using the money to innoculate 50,000 children is not going to favor the old lady.
I told him, too, about my old high school friend Tom, a talented TV producer who emigrated to New Zealand in 1997. In 2003 doctors discovered a pinhole-sized defect in one of his heart valves and scheduled him for corrective surgery. “Scheduled” in this case meant queued. He had to wait months for an available operating room. While he waited, his heart degenerated, and by the time the socialists in New Zealand got around to operating on him, his heart was too weak to restart. He lasted five days on machines before his wife pulled the plug.
I asked my friend to multiply my wife and Tom by several million to get an idea of why the “mobs” at town halls are worried that Obamacare will morph quickly into The Great American Death Machine.
Surprisingly, my friend listened and did not argue. It seems to me that he was hearing things for the first time that just aren’t discussed among the smugsters at NPR and the other whore media. I think I planted a seed—we go way back and he knows that I am not a madman or a liar.
The Anger Grows…
Will the mob reach a flashpoint?…
The one thing I took away from the 1960′s cultural revolution (some years later) was that the Federal Government (and would not matter who held the reign of power) would never allow the citizens to question political decisions again in a meaningful way. The campus demonstrations spilled over beyond the campus and into the homes of that generation.
I knew then, that any future decisions regarding government programs, conflicts, internal or external would be handled with kid gloves. They were going to feed us the agenda with sugar coated politicians. They only had to wait it out … aging WWII Veterans, aging baby boomers and the aged. Period.
The sugar coated plan (health care) will not be unfolded at once. It is a 10-20 year plan in it’s fullness, cost and intent. The worst part is that there are several generations that were lured into it and became dependent upon it just as they have with Social Security (another program that is doomed).
Fast forward 40 years later, the Feds now have control of the auto industry (we’ll tell you what to drive) and want con$rol of the health business with the news media firmly in their pocket while writing 1,000 page manifestos (legislation) at full speed. Every business failure is a Federal opportunity to own, manage, legislate and control it. I’ll add, finally, the Fannie/Freddie debacle to the mix here (another government program that had to be designed for failure) and therefore, would revert even home ownership to government controls.
“I think I planted a seed”
I think the seeds need to planted in the ears of a younger generation. They seem clueless and unable to connect the dots.
>>he sneered about the “organized disrupters” and “mobs” that have been showing up at congressional town hall meetings>>
I can’t argue with success, of course, and if you can get him to rethink things, more power to you! But I can’t help wondering when people are going to ask Libs how these “organized disrupters” differ from ACORN, SEIU, and Community Organizers. Obama got paid by someone. And what did he do for his pay? Exactly what they’re sneering at protesters for doing…so what’s the difference?
>>I think the seeds need to planted in the ears of a younger generation.>>
Hmm. Guess I better check out where I can find Charles’ recommended book for sophisticated college students, buy a few and plant them in conspicuous places.
Not at my son’s home, though. We’d have internecine war!
The proximal cause of the Boston Massacre, as near as we can tell, was — over several hours — the crowd taunting a lone British sentry, and then an apprentice wigmaker taunting a British officer — mistakenly — over a bill. Foolish things were done and said on both sides, but the tensions were up, and something was bound to happen, and it did.
Point is, what gets a group of people that pissed off? At some point it only takes a spark, and it doesn’t really matter what that spark is. The real offenses have already occurred.
Interestingly, the first person killed was Crispus Attucks, a black man, and the first person injured severely enough to require hospitalization in St. Louis was also a black man handing out yellow Gadsden flags (“Don’t Tread On Me”) who was attacked by union goons.
Oh, yes. I fear it’s coming. I pray not, but I fear for our country.
I think that’s the reason violence flared in Tampa and St. Louis; these places are not as politically lopsided as Marin/San Fran or Maryland, where a local congresswoman in a 86 percent Democratic district held a town hall w/o incident (and probably w/few if any opinions adverse to Obamacare expressed). Central Florida including Tampa and Orlando is known as a swing area in a crucial electoral state and a resident here I can report that there are Stepford Democrats who profess only contempt for those they demean as rethugs, repiggies and, now, Ragers. St. Louis I am not familiar with but I suspect it is another area where the fuse is ready to be lit.
Here’s the Kos strategy for dealing with Ragers: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/8/9/764080/-Birth-Control-for-Birthers,-Teabaggers-and-RagersHOW-DEMOCRATS-CAN-TALK-CONSTITUENTS-ABOUT-HEALTH
NOTE: commentator Susan S. is a Tampa Democrat activist.
People like HelenL speak about promoting peace and the negation of White Privilege.
They are only ever enablers for the cycle of violence.
History said so. We said so. They said it wasn’t so. They said they were legitimate. That we should have listened to them. That we were ignorant.
In 500 years from now, when everyone we know will have become dust, history will still say the same thing and the reply will be the same.
This is the tragedy of the human species. But unlike Greek tragedies, the heroes need not listen to the Gods nor to hubris. Nor do they need to listen to the advice of the Iagos.
Don’t listen to the Democrats. They will lead you on a path with as much joy as the path Iago led Othello on. Don’t listen to the enemies of humanity. They aren’t the sources of enlightenment. They aren’t the purveyors of honesty. They aren’t out to reinforce the good in human beings.
In 500 years from now, when everyone we know will have become dust, history will still say the same thing and the reply will be the same.
You are quite right. As the generations live and die, so does the memory and mistakes of each one.
I live in the suburbs of St. Louis, and I gotta tell you, I feel like the fuse is already lit. The suburbs of st. Louis, including my little subdivision is very politically diverse and tensions are high.
Flashpoint? Revolution? I’m not sure that it has come to that, yet; but it is interesting that we are not even into a full year of the Obama administration and this is all happening.
I do feel that something is going to happen in the next 3-4 years. It is the not knowing what is going to happen that is getting to me.
Is it wrong of me to hope that the Democrates get trounced this coming November so that they cannot pass any more bad legislation?
Charles
Is it wrong of me to hope that the Democrats get trounced this coming November so that they cannot pass any more bad legislation?
You’ll have to wait until 2010 and if it includes ‘bitch-slapping’ Pelosi, I am all for it.
I think if the adverse reactions continue into the fall and beyond, and if Congress/Senate pass legislation it will be scaled back (sugar coating). Of course, the long term goal is total control, but they will do what they have always done, attach amendments to other bills and vote on late at night or whenever they feel the public is distracted (Thanksgiving through January 1).
By the way..read Prof. Franz Michael’s obit. Amazing story. Imagine, being half Jewish saved his life.
Correction on my post #4
The worst part is that there are several generations that were lured into it and became dependent upon it just as they have with Social Security. The ‘it’ I was referring to is Medicare.