You Know Damn Well This Isn’t about Health Care…
August 18, 2009 by Staff
Filed under News, Weekly Columns
(Akiit.com) Last week in Hagerstown, Maryland, the Secret Service detained a man outside a town hall meeting. He was holding a sign that said death to President Obama, Michelle Obama and their kids. The man said he came to debate health care but couldn’t get in because it was too crowded.
That same week, on the main drag of Hancock Park, a wealthy, decidedly liberal enclave of Los Angeles, in front of the Rite Aid, a young woman and man tended a table holding pamphlets and a clipboard for signatures. From three sides of the table hung high-quality color posters of President Obama as Adolph Hitler under a heading that read something like, “The Greatest Fascist of them all.â€
Across these United States, in seemingly dissimilar cities and neighborhoods, people are up in arms. Proud Americans, with all the etiquette of patrons at a Friday night dog fight, are expressing stark anger and disappointment.
And all this vein-popping vexation is about health care in America.
Sure it is. What else would get folks’ panties in such a vicious, unyielding bunch? What else could it be? After all, these people are of every cliché you can possibly babble: they’ve “had it up to here,†they think “a good debate is healthy for the country,†they’re “sick and tired and they’re not going to take it anymore.†Matters not that they took it, without the courtesy or dignity of lubricant, sedative or stiff drink, for two previous Presidential terms without so much as a whimper.
As usual, they’ve taken an issue of pressing and grave concern facing the nation–in this case, our calamitous health care system–and are exploiting the plight to express one thing, the thing that always gets expressed, one way or another.
How do you go from to wanting to “debate†health care to threatening to kill somebody? Are there no gears between “I beg to differ†and “I hope a Peterbilt truck runs you over and drags you for several miles on an unpaved road at a high rate of speed, after which hyenas come to devour what’s left of your carcassâ€?
As Logic calmly said to Stupidity, You know damn well you can’t get there from here.
What in the world does it say about us as a society that for every thing we do, there is an episode of “The Twilight Zone“? This health care fracas is what happens in “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” the 1960 TZ episode where a neighborhood’s prejudice and paranoia creates a hysteria that causes inhabitants of the community to turn on one another.
This is not about health care. This is about ignorance. This is about hate. This is about fear. This is ’bout a damn shame.
With debates like these, who needs a public lynching? One can only hope those doing all the shouting have ample coverage. That kind of carrying on is anything but healthy.
Written By Steven Ivory