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Words matter to the GOP and apparently they matter even more when they are violent words. and the GOP seems to see it as a chance to turn out votes.
Sarah Palin told her Republican followers to "reload" and "aim for" Democrats, directing GOP activists to her website where they found a map of the country festooned with rifle scope cross-hairs over Congressional districts held by Democrats. Palin's rifle scope map is the kind of image one might expect to see in an ad for a violent, first-person shooter video game.
Chairman of the RNC, Michael Steele, issued a recent call to Republicans to put Nancy Pelosi on the "firing line" because of the health insurance reform bill. By using the phrase "firing line," Steele encourages Republican activists to think of the next election as an execution of the opposition or a violent killing.
These are just two examples of the picture republicans are trying to paint in the minds of those that make up their base, fueled by constant and never ending lies and mis-truths, they prey on the fears, weaknesses and insecurities of groups like the Tea Party or militias like the Hutaree.
An old joke says “The people are revolting” but revolting against what exactly?
The role of the revolutionary is to have a vision. It is to overthrow a tired status quo, to liberate the enslaved – whether they are physically enslaved or whether they are bound to ideologies that no longer function. The revolutionary tends to be a free thinker, a liberal concerned with a fairer deal for all. The revolutionary wants to move us forward.
The new revolutionaries, however, have emerged from some freakish opposite dimension bizarro world. They are ultraconservatives, fighting for poorer health, poverty, ideological enslavement, wider gaps between the haves and have nots, the pre-eminence of ‘rights’ over needs, unlimited economic growth even if it leads to societal and planetary collapse and most incomprehensible of all believing that McShitstain/Palin was a good direction for America.
Their revolution is based in fear rather than vision.
This ‘Tea Bagger’ revolution has nothing to do with what is really wrong, nor is it intended to fix anything. It is just a senseless acting out of what Robert Bly called the Sibling Society – a society populated by emotionally inarticulate adults of the late post-war generation who have come to be ruled by consumerism, professional, personal self interest and narcissism.
The end result?
Emotionally stunted or “half-grown adults”, intent on their own agendas, and incapable of fulfilling their parental, nurturing and leadership obligations to the next generation. In short, a society populated by a bunch of pseudo-adolescents who want everything all the time and who can’t think past their own childish tantrums to the damage they are doing.
So where are the real revolutionaries?
The ones who understand the complexity of modern life and the urgent need for change and are agitating to move us forward within that framework. The ones that give the average Joe common man a promise of hope.
The Republican Party is doing a great job in provoking a dangerous episode by making consensual governance impossible in a time of awful practical problems and challenges. They're in the process, right now, of transforming themselves from the party of "no" to the party of no decency, no common sense, no ideas, no conception of the public interest, and no respect for the traditions that they pretend to stand for, like due process of law.
In the days since the passage of health care reform, they've gone as far as inciting mobs to violence against their fellow congressmen and senators -- bricks thrown through windows, death threats made, coffins placed in the yards of their adversaries.
One day soon, somebody with a gun or an explosive device, someone with a very sketchy sense-of-self, and perhaps a recent record of personal failure and humiliation, is going to sacrifice himself by gong one step further to become the Tea Party's first martyr by shooting up a shopping mall or some other hate/fear induced act of violence spurred on by the terrorist republican party.
The consequences could be deadly.
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