I have been listening.
More often, people say, "stupid".
"Are people really that stupid?"
"Is she really that stupid?"
"Don't people know anything?"
It sounds arrogant just to say it.
But how can Christine O'Donnell not know that the nation was founded on the principle of religious freedom; that centuries of religious wars, and intolerance, and persecution and death was not what our founders wanted; that they wanted a nation in which no religion had the inside track, and in which people could not be denied the right to be religious or not, as they chose?
Barack Obama's birth certificate is on file in Hawaii, and a local newspaper even reported his birth at the time, but people still think he was born in Kenya, or on Krypton. All his adult life he has been an active Christian, and people wonder whether he is a Muslim.
People who have no health care oppose attempts to provide health care, or almost worse, propose insurance plans to provide inadequate and incomplete health care at huge extra costs because they don't want government messing with their government Medicare!
Our schools are miserable. We have tolerated the protection of sub-standard teachers. The buildings are deteriorating. We complain, and explain that we don't want to pay taxes, even though our tax burden is the lightest it has been in ever so long! Try to tell that to a tea drinker!
Our industrial society is worn out, and industry is doing what it always has done: move to areas of the world where cheap labor, mostly former agricultural workers, is abundant. The result is that we have what is likely to be a significant population that will never regain what they once had. It is their fault, we say. Cut off their unemployment assistance!
Madness! Who is thinking clearly?
Two years ago, in the midst of what almost became a global financial collapse, we elected people to do something about what was happening under the former administration, and to provide health care for people, and to try to create jobs. Now, two years later, realizing how monumental that task is, people want to go back to the policies that created the mess: Get rid of regulation! End Social Security! Abolish the Department of Education! End anti-discrimination laws that affect private businesses!
I don't really think it is stupidity. I think it is anxiety. People are anxious, afraid, confused, lost. They think we have lost our country. There is a Black man in the White House! It scares them, blindly, irrationally, meanly.
It gives us Michele Bachmann, and Sarah Palin, and Rand Paul, and Sharron Angle, Christine O'Donnell, Paladino, that guy in Alaska, and neighbors who are soiling their drawers. They aren't stupid. They are afraid, and they are doing what scared people do.
More often, people say, "stupid".
"Are people really that stupid?"
"Is she really that stupid?"
"Don't people know anything?"
It sounds arrogant just to say it.
But how can Christine O'Donnell not know that the nation was founded on the principle of religious freedom; that centuries of religious wars, and intolerance, and persecution and death was not what our founders wanted; that they wanted a nation in which no religion had the inside track, and in which people could not be denied the right to be religious or not, as they chose?
Barack Obama's birth certificate is on file in Hawaii, and a local newspaper even reported his birth at the time, but people still think he was born in Kenya, or on Krypton. All his adult life he has been an active Christian, and people wonder whether he is a Muslim.
People who have no health care oppose attempts to provide health care, or almost worse, propose insurance plans to provide inadequate and incomplete health care at huge extra costs because they don't want government messing with their government Medicare!
Our schools are miserable. We have tolerated the protection of sub-standard teachers. The buildings are deteriorating. We complain, and explain that we don't want to pay taxes, even though our tax burden is the lightest it has been in ever so long! Try to tell that to a tea drinker!
Our industrial society is worn out, and industry is doing what it always has done: move to areas of the world where cheap labor, mostly former agricultural workers, is abundant. The result is that we have what is likely to be a significant population that will never regain what they once had. It is their fault, we say. Cut off their unemployment assistance!
Madness! Who is thinking clearly?
Two years ago, in the midst of what almost became a global financial collapse, we elected people to do something about what was happening under the former administration, and to provide health care for people, and to try to create jobs. Now, two years later, realizing how monumental that task is, people want to go back to the policies that created the mess: Get rid of regulation! End Social Security! Abolish the Department of Education! End anti-discrimination laws that affect private businesses!
I don't really think it is stupidity. I think it is anxiety. People are anxious, afraid, confused, lost. They think we have lost our country. There is a Black man in the White House! It scares them, blindly, irrationally, meanly.
It gives us Michele Bachmann, and Sarah Palin, and Rand Paul, and Sharron Angle, Christine O'Donnell, Paladino, that guy in Alaska, and neighbors who are soiling their drawers. They aren't stupid. They are afraid, and they are doing what scared people do.
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