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TIME TO START TALKING WITH TEABAGGERS
Mike Elk, Truthout - A few weeks ago, I attended the teabagger protests in DC. The thing I noticed the most about the folks there was that, for the most part, they were friendly, nice, hardworking people. Sure, there were some crazies; sure, there were some racists. For the most part, though, they looked like the type of folks I grew up with in the labor movement, coming to DC to enjoy a protest and spend the rest of the weekend taking in some monuments and museums. These weren't rich suburbanites; the teabaggers I saw were mainly poor people, whose trip to DC were probably the only the vacation they would be able to afford this year.
Growing up in Pittsburgh
Even recently, my own grandmother, a lifelong Democrat, admitted to my mother that she was unsure about health care reform because of the "death panels."
Is my grandmother some sort of stupid, racist, teabagging reactionary? I think not. This is the woman who, after all, told me stories about how she was called a "Mediterranean n**ger" growing up and was sympathetic to the experience of African-Americans. But has my grandmother been lied to by Democrats and Republicans alike and seen her standard of living decline over the past 30 years? Sure. And has this led my grandmother to the point where she is so confused about what to believe that she simply doesn't trust government because, mostly, what government has done is hurt her over the last 30 years? Without a doubt.
As Sara Robinson argues in her must-read piece analyzing the rise of the teabagger movement among working-class Americans:
"No democracy in history has ever survived with our current levels of inequality. There's no reason for the middle and working classes to trust anything about a system that's so clearly rigged to suck money straight out of their pockets into the tax-free offshore bank accounts of the wealthy - who, of course, turn right around and use that money to buy off our government, so they can suck up even more of our economy for themselves."
People are confused. They are angry, and they have little faith in government. . .
The progressive movement - in particular, progressive bloggers - are making a big mistake in attacking the other side by calling them racist. It merely makes them feel defensive because nobody wants to listen to someone that is attacking them with such an emotional bomb.
Its makes the teabaggers resent the progressive movement and view them as rich, college-educated elitists that only want to tell them how wrong they are.
Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are giving white working-class males a huge hug. They are saying, "Come here; we understood you; we are one of you. We will fight on your behalf against elitist liberals who call you names." Working-class people, especially men, respond by listening to Glenn Beck even more and attacking progressives. It's an endless, destructive cycle in which no one wins.
As Martin Luther King explained in his sermon "The Strength To Love":
"Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction."
During the whole dialogue on teabaggers, I never heard the narrative of why these poor people were turning up at the town halls. They were turning up because they were scared of change, because the only change they have known is their standard of living dramatically decreasing over the last 30 years. I never heard anyone talk about how most of the teabaggers are the people that need health care reform the most.
In fact, we got off message entirely. We stopped talking about health care reform altogether. We failed to articulate a progressive vision these people might buy into. We took an eye for an eye, leaving everyone blind.
Very few of us made any attempt to really reach out and embrace these teabaggers on the issues that we share with them. Many of their concerns about the bailout, NAFTA-style trade deals and the general loss of trust in government are core progressive issues. We could lock arms with the teabaggers and form a powerful alliance, but, instead, we attack our potential allies because we do not take the time to engage them.
As Martin Luther King explains:
"Men often hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they cannot communicate."
If we don't communicate with the white working class, we are never going to achieve true progressive change. We are just going to attack each other in an endless cycle and fail to realize our shared values.
It's time that we raise up above immature name calling and start talking to the teabaggers. Together, we can win.
13 Comments:
I told you people Ron Paul had the most progressive platform but you voted for a prettyboy tarbaby icon. The only Blacks you benefited were on the take anyway. You sure didn't help the social worker mother of a soldier down thr street who's now in the nuthouse 'cause her son was killed in Iraq.
If you want to try to use these people to advance your 'progressive' agenda, you could start by not calling them "teabaggers."
Corporate media shills smear sincere working class people as 'racist' because they object to rampant corruption in DC. Divide and conquer: Keep the masses fighting each other, while you loot the Treasury.
The Bush regimes attacks on this country's libertarian heritage are an irrefutable fact. And it's also an irrefutable fact that the "Tea Party Movement" didn't exist during his presidency.
That's because the movement's leaders and the majority of its followers are the same people who gave Bush their unquestioning support while he repeatedly soiled the Constitution.
Comment no. 1 sort of exposes the problem with this article... alot of them ARE racist. It's not our problem to try and pull the curtains to these people that have believed the lies of the right-wing media for 30 years. They need to figure out some things for themselves... and not be racist idiots while doing so.
Ron Paul... give me an effing break.
You know, I really want to see the logic to this argument. My father's family sound like your grandmother's - too poor to be racist.
Then your very first commenter calls the President "tarbaby". Fuck him and all his racist pals, this world is going to leave them in the dust.
And if teabaggers see anyone who is "college educated" as elite, then they have a huge problem. Am I elite? I went to a state school in a big red state and paid my student loan well into my thirties. If the GOP decides resents me as elite, they can essentially every parent in this country goodbye. Good riddance.
The fact is, dear boy, I am Black, at least according to my birth certificate. The tarbaby, in Joel Chandler Harris tale, is an artificial construction intended to entrap the gullible. My criticism of Obama is not racial. I wasn’t aware I had to identify myself by race before I could criticize. My objection to Obama is that he is a fraud and a liar. If, as he originally suggested, the Iraq war had been ended, my neighbor’s son would be alive and she would not be institutionalized. It’s interesting thet you focused on some perceived insult instead of the reality of death.
American politics is divided by a completely phony 'left vs right' divide.
What you really have is a group of criminals in Washington who are committed to serving the people who paid the millions of dollars that it took to get them elected. These people are not serving the national interest, but only the interests of those who bought them.
This creates opposition from all you are outside this circle of thieves. But, the phony Democrats try to divert all opposition from their left into attacks on a 'right' that is largely a propaganda creation. And the phony Republicans try to divert all opposition from their right into attacks on a 'left' that is also an equally phony propaganda creation.
You know this, because if you are on the left, the Republican attacks on the left sound ridiculous. The key is to realize that the Democrat attacks on the right must sound equally ridiculous.
The key is to realize that the criminals in the center are diverting opposition that should be aimed directly at them off onto other targets.
The divide between the opposition on the left and the opposition on the right is phony, and its a creation of the criminals who've stolen our government. Its aim is to keep its opponents divided so the criminals can stay in charge of our piggybanks.
The day the 'left' and the 'right' figure out that they really oppose the same policies from the same group of criminals in the 'center', then that's the day the people can start to regain control of their government from these criminals.
Any article like this that tries to point out the similarities between the opposition on the left and the opposition on the right will inevitably draw a lot of comments that will attempt to fan phony flames between the two opposition groups.
Both sides oppose our ever-expanding wars. Both sides oppose giving all our taxpayer money to Wall Street in bailouts. Both sides call for serious campaign and election and really government reform that would take our elections away from big money and put them back into the hands of the people.
The trick is, the two groups need to unite in order to accomplish these tasks. Letting a strong opponent like we all face run a 'divide and conquer' strategy against us is suicidal.
For example, look at the 'health care debate'. What I see is a phony health reform bill that was written by reps of the big health corporations (HMOs, health insurers, hospital corps, big pharma) and designed to be highly beneficial to those same big health corporations.
And then I hear the Republicans call this 'socialized medicine'.
Maybe its because I used to drink beer with socialists, real ones, the local organizers for the ISO. So, I know a real socialist when I see one. And I know the difference between real socialized medicine and a health care system designed to extract maximum profits from the ill and injured for the big corporations involved in 'health care'.
So, when I hear the Republicans talk about 'socialized medicine', I want to laugh because it sounds so ridiculous.
This is the Republicans using a fictional caricature of a 'left' as a means of diverting opposition on the right away from them. When viewed from the left, its obviously pure fantasy.
The key is for people on the left to realize that the Democrats attacks on what it perceives as the right are equally ridiculous. The Democrats attack a phantom propaganda creation called 'the right' whenever they need to divert attention from their base.
Its no accident that the part of the media that tilts pro-Democrat is running an awful lot of stories about 'teabaggers' and 'birthers' and the like. The problem the Democrats face today is that their base is just now starting to figure out had badly the Democrats are shafting them, and that everything the Democrats said in the last election was a lie. Quick, run out another 'teabagger' story, the mob is coming round the corner and we need to give them a fake rabbit to chase.
My guess is that the 'teabagger' stories look just as ridiculous to the real people in the opposition on the right as the 'socialist' claims against corporate-serving Democrats seem to me.
Its all bs designed to keep us divided.
jokeass progressives is correct in stating that Obama "is a fraud and a liar," which brings to mind the late Hunter Thompson's quip that:
In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: Not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely.
Corporate power to the politicians of this nation is like dope to an addict. Their appetites are insatiable and they will do and say anything to keep getting their corporate fixes. In ‘America,’ the unending greed of a relative few has emaciated the many.
Democracy is utterly meaningless when it is selective. So it continues to be today: The people speak and the politicians sputter and ultimately ignore them / us. The Wall Street corporate vampires speak and the politicians jump right in line.
Far too many citizens of this nation have chosen to pretend to themselves that we have a people’s democracy, when in fact what we have is an insidious form of 21st century style corporate fascism. The ‘White’ House, the Congress, the judiciary, the military, and the police are in fact all subservient to the corporate, capitalist barons of Wall Street. To deny this reality is to exist in some bizarre state of dangerous mental fantasy.
I am reminded of a recent television program I watched on the corporate backed so-called Public Broadcast Service (PBS) network wherein Indigenous Native peoples on this continent were repeatedly referred to as Native ‘American’ even though it was crystal clear (even in that particular television program) that these peoples had their own names for the land and had lived on this continent thousands of years before there was even any such thing as a so-called ‘America.’ Nonetheless, the PBS program insisted on referring to them as Native ‘Americans’ as if their history only began with the inception of the so-called ‘American’ continents. Notwithstanding the wanton wholesale slaughter and genocide of the Indigenous Native peoples - this is living in denial, which so many in this land are so adept at practicing - denial of the obvious. This must cease.
We do not live in a people’s democracy. We live in what some call a corporate plutocracy, but what I bluntly refer to as 21st century style corporate fascism - plain and simple. While the masses of people of all colors, and most particularly people of color, increasingly suffer from unemployment, no health care, homelessness, police brutality, and judicial misconduct - the bloated Wall Street corporate elite are making a proverbial killing at the expense of every day people. To deny this would be to deny the obvious.
In ‘America’ the pretense of democracy is constantly shown to be a farce, but too many dare not break this cycle of schizophrenic denial. As ever, the corporate media continues to distract, distort, and omit; and this should be expected.
Even the U.S. Constitution is, in the 21st century, nothing more than a mockery of what might have been, as constitutional right after constitutional right has been, and is being, steadily eroded in the fake name of patriotism and national security. Meanwhile, the corporate elite are making enormous profit thanks to the unjust U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and elsewhere; even as U.S. military personnel continually serve as cannon fodder and are being returned to this country in body bags or physically and mentally maimed. Moreover, the peoples in the aforementioned regions have been, and continue to pay a most hideous price in death and destruction; all in the name of U.S. democracy which the overwhelming majority of people in this nation do not have or enjoy.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, of substance has changed, nor will it until we the people organize, demand, and relentlessly struggle for a real people’s democracy, not a 21st century style corporate fascist plutocracy.
Onward sisters and brothers. Onward!
blackcommentator.com
This is a good piece. Thank you for writing it, and forcing me to think a little harder.
Teabaggers are a 'subgroup' that is Anti-Federalist, which is the very heart of the Republican Party.
But, whatever the reason, be it racism, taxation, roe v wade, or scientific education that includes Creationism, they will fight a strong Federal government that impedes their individual ideology. To try to engage them in a dispassionate dialogue would be an exercise in futility.
Maybe I'm just not intellectual enough to follow how many of these comments relate to the article. However I really enjoyed the Larry Pinckey comment, and agree.
While I would like to see some kind of resolution to our bipartisan bickering and irresponsible government actions, I seem agree with Al Gore when he refused to run for President and stated (I paraphrase) that the system is broken and there isn't anything a person can do working within the system.
Maybe we could learn from History, and do what England did - Bring in 'outsiders' to rule the country.
-DaTheorist
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