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Precarious Human Decency

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 I do enjoy morning coffee, in a coffee shop, with other people who are ready to greet the day, greet each other, and engage in wit, argument, debate and pure "I'm glad to see you!".  That is to say, it is pleasure to think about things together. 

That is in contrast to those times when we meet people who simply shout.  They are not early morning coffee drinkers, glad to see each other, glad to talk about what is in the news.  They are . . . well . . . they are the people who don't drink tea:  they wear it on their hats. 

They spit on other people; tell them to do impossible things to themselves.  They are people like the Tea Baggers; calling the President a fascist, Barney Franks a faggot, and seeming to believe that providing a lame version of universal health care will bring Jesus on a cloud, and cause an end-of-the-world war that will have blood coursing through the valleys as high as horses' bits. 

Frank Rich has it right:  we have a Black President, a female Speaker of the House, a Latina woman on the Supreme Court, and admittedly and comfortably gay Members of Congress. 

Is it an accident that most of the people who call themselves . . . what is it now?  Tea Partiers? . . . are White, fundamentalist Christian, and advocates of the hopeless notion that the United States was founded as a White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, nation, presently being overrun with brown-skinned people, and people who do not adhere to their fundamentalist Christian ideas about God, religion, and guns?  They believe that what they are is what God created at the beginning, about 6,000 years ago, and that the United States is supposed to be God's Homeland for His Special White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant people. 

If Barack Obama were in favor of apple pie, they would hate him for it.  If Nancy Polosi advocated good grades in shool, they would call her a witch.  If Sonia Maria Sotomayor said she did justice, loved mercy, and walked humbly with her God, they would spit on the sidewalk before her.  If Barney Frank were in favor of "No Right Turns on Red", it would be a political statement. 

Sometimes when people hurt, they look for someone to hurt instead of figuring out exactly what is wrong.  Right now, a lot of people are hurting.  Under the last Administration, the whole damned economy almost came down around our ears, and the President and Congress had to do something about it before all hell broke loose.  It was close.  People need jobs, health care, an education, roads, bridges, and a dentist.  But instead of thinking clearly, they do a very human thing, and get mad!

That is when our savagery re-emerges; when the lizard brain at the bottom of our skull lashes out.  That is why racism has surfaced again, why people go get their guns, why they start cursing and spitting and reading their Holy Books again, looking for something Nostradamus, or St. John, or Ezekiel said, as if that had to do with anything today. 

These are precarious times for human decency and understanding.

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