Sticks and Stones

It seems like a weird time for our politics. Lots of anger and shouting and name calling. OK, that doesn't sound all that weird, but it seems to be turned up quite a bit lately. Some people are worried about all this rhetoric being a preamble to something. I don't blame people for worrying.

To be more specific, I don't blame genuinely worried people. On the other hand, people exploiting threats for political gain should find something more constructive to do with themselves. Maybe they should take up pot smoking. It'll totally mellow them out, and they'll most likely lose their jobs so we won't have to deal with them anymore.

Political assassination is a scary thing, because it only takes one lunatic to take a shot at someone. I think threats and violence against big important people like Presidents and Congressmen, or even just celebrities, anyone who has serious security, remind us how unsafe us regular folks are sometimes. So I don't blame people for being worried.

Me? I'm not that worried. I don't think something bad is about to happen. Or, more accurately, I don't think something bad is any more likely to happen now than it normally would be. This strikes me more as a Republican temper tantrum, mixed with the loud, obnoxious racism, homophobia and general intolerance of the tea idiots. Put them together and it looks kind of scary.

But really, the tea people aren't violent, they're just super angry and not terribly bright. And the Republicans aren't violent either. They're mad because they lost an election, and then another one. Then, they really thought they had this health care thing won, and they lost that too. I think this is just the political equivalent of Republicans kicking the wall and calling the Democrats big fat poopyheads. They'll get over it, we just need to get them some ice cream, or take them to McDonald's for dinner, that always did it for me.

Speaking of poopyheads, I have a question for Republicans. Every once in a while, I'll hear some TV bobblehead complain about President Obama's secret plan to redistribute the wealth. They paint him as some kind of evil, big government Robinhood, using taxes and health care to steal from the rich and give to the poor. This, of course, is what makes him a socialist who's destroying America.

Here's my question. Where were all the so-called conservatives when your hero Ronald Reagan was dismantling the middle class with his ridiculous economic theory and redistributing what little wealth they had to rich people? I don't like redistribution of wealth either way, because that's not what the government is supposed to be doing. But it seems to me that a lot of the people calling themselves "conservatives" today are OK with redistributing wealth as long as it's moving upward.

The interesting thing is how many regular, everyday people seem to be all for it. How do you get regular people so angry about making it harder for insurance companies to screw us? Or regulating banks? Or taxing the wealthy? Two theories. The first is the old myth of the American dream. Everyone's planning for the day they get rich. That's an old theory and still a perfectly plausible one. But I have a better idea.

Stockholm syndrome. The insurance companies and the banks and all the other big corporations are holding us hostage. They threaten to set the economy on fire if we don't bail them out. They threaten to raise premiums if health care reform passes. They threaten to lay people off and raise prices if taxes go up. If the government upsets the status quo, the corporations punish the people, that's the threat. And so many of the people buy right into it, but it's not because they're stupid. Being a hostage sucks, you can't blame people for begging the cops to give the hostage takers whatever they want, and you can't blame people for identifying with their captors, it happens all the time.

I guess this means I can't call the tea people stupid anymore (damn, I was really enjoying that). No more calling them tea idiots, or stupid ignorant racist homophobes. Wait, I can still call some of them racist homophobes, that part doesn't really have anything to do with the rest of this, some of those people just really don't like black people (and Arabs, and Muslims, and the gays, oh and Mexicans, we're about to start talking about immigration reform again, I'm pretty sure I can guess where the tea people will stand). But I can't call them stupid anymore, and I won't.

And, honestly, they aren't stupid. They're mostly regular, hard-working people who want what's best for the country. They look stupid sometimes because they're getting all riled up and mislead by the likes of Beck and Hannity and Palin and Bachmann. Ah...I feel so much better, that last sentence just reminded me that I still have plenty of people to call stupid.