All We Do Is Wait, Wait, Wait on Hold and It's Making Us Nuts Is This Why People Join the Tea Party

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/personal-health/all-we-do-wait-wait-wait-hold-and-its-making-us-nuts-why-people-join-tea-party



We are a nation on hold. We wait endlessly for everything. Some of us are forced to wait in physical lines, but increasingly these queues are electronic or digital. We can’t get answers to our questions or obtain help with important problems from the huge corporate entities that sell us insurance, mortgages, medications, airline tickets, computer hardware and software, phone and cable service, and even direct medical care. The toxic result of this increasingly intolerable system of phone queues, Muzak, and long waits is helplessness. But like the frog that doesn’t know it’s being cooked because the temperature of the water rises slowly, these particular feelings of helplessness have become so ubiquitous that they seem normal. Waiting just seems like the way the world is and the way it’s supposed to be.

Helplessness is the most destructive of human emotions. Human beings respond to helplessness with depression or, more commonly, rage. The Tea Party exploits these feelings of helplessness by tapping into this rage — blaming government and scapegoating liberals and the poor. Their narrative suggests that everyone but them gets help. Rather than receive support and respect, they feel that they get the cold shoulder or are pushed around. They have to wait in line and their place always seems to be in the back.

This narrative may be wrong and mean-spirited, but the helplessness from which it stems is real. Our lives are shot through with things we can’t control, from job opportunities, workplaces, health care, schools, to politicians beholden to special interests.

But while we fight against the causes of these major forms of alienation, let’s not forget those small but ubiquitous instances that riddle our lives and contribute to a culture of helplessness; namely, the various ways that we all have to wait, endlessly wait, to get information and help from those institutions upon which we’re dependent. Waiting, often on the phone, drives most of us crazy. Such experiences don’t get featured in the New York Times, but they nourish the soil of powerlessness and rejection in which right wing ideologies can grow.

[tridim]

1. I experienced three long waits at the local Subway.

And I haven't been back since. Done and done.

People join the teabaggers because they are RACISTS. Period.

[Javaman]

2. +1000 nt