When the insurrection comes

 

Monday, March 22, 2010

           

After a sunny weekend, the rains hit this morning, thick with that old sense of Monday blues.

            It is the kind of blues I still love to feel, strolling through the warm air, chilled in a magical way I still can’t fully explain.

            Maybe in this complicated new and vicious society we have become, days like this bring me back to when I believed the world was a better place, those lonely days strolling the old neighborhoods when in the midst of riot and revolution, I still believed the world was capable of becoming a better place.

            I have grown cynical with age and no longer have hope for human kind. We always go back to the same place.

            This is a week when the true colors of the American Tea Party came out as they spat on legislators who choose to vote for healthcare reform and call African American Congressman, “Niggers.”

            As a kid, I wondered how good Germans could hate Jews.

            This is not to say that I haven’t negative feelings. I remember being angry that I could not buy a hamburger at an exclusive Jewish mall in Wayne. I have also terrible concern over arrogance of the Zionists, who would treat Palestinians the way Jews got treated throughout history. But how could anybody wish any group of people out of existence?

            How could any civilized society breed people like the brown shirts?

            I never thought that we would take steps back, even when I saw the worst of the abuses of the blacks in the south in the 1960s.

            But friends tell me America is arming in the same way. We have groups of paramilitary people preparing for the day when the poor get so desperate they will rise up. This new insurrection movement looks and sounds and talks just like the brown shirted Nazis, some even keep their kids in schools where they can train them in the same way Hitler’s Youth were trained.

            Yet even then, I assumed these were simply nutty people – like Black Water International – sick people who love to kill. That would be dangerous enough since Black Water and their ilk are exactly what the brown shirts were. The real danger comes when the old barriers, the society with conscience, refuses to refute the actions of these monsters, and gives them license to kill.

            This is why the Tea Party is so dangerous, giving into the worst of human nature, motivating hatred for political gain, when in the end even Hitler was forced to crack down on his brown shirted friends until he consolidated power.

            It is, however, when good people do nothing that the real danger emerges, which is why when I talked to a local doctor who had gone over seas as part of the military that I lost hope.

            He clearly felt no need to uphold human rights, and that anything a soldier does to an enemy is okay with him.

            Does this change when we redefine who the enemy is?

            When the uprising poor become our new enemies, will this Dirty Harry sickness still prevail?

            I walk through the rain this morning, fresh from a political victory that I know will soon backfire. We won against the Tea Party only to cause them to hate us more, and to stir the pot on this insane sense of disrespect. The next step will be violence.