More About Fear

There is a rapist loose who has struck in my neighborhood, we are running out of oil, most of us are uninsured, and the leadership of this country has created a drunken bubble of cognitive dissonance that could really do anything evil in the name of God and the Apocalypse. Read a transcript of an old-style investigative journalist who puts the as-yet unrevealed horrific tortures at Al Ghirab that our country committed, in perspective with the neocon religious cultist stranglehold that the Bush administration has on this country.

http://www.pastpeak.com/archives/2004/07/post_1.htm

We really let ourselves slip into this situation when Rush Limbaugh went unanswered, I suppose. Which was enabled when Reagan lifted fair-time regulations on the media, if I remember my history accurately.

Now we find ourselves, less than two decades later, in a divided, polarized culture where people of different political perspectives do not even come into contact, except in the family. Where if I bring up a politically embarrassing fact to my right-wing cousin, he blasts out death threats to my "terroristic friends" and has jokingly referred to political pogroms to cleanse the country of left-leaning citizens.

When I point out to him that such a policy would result in me, a natural-born citizen and blood relative being deported or "disappeared" he will say it was just a joke. I think lots of "jokes" like this are being made in families nationwide. And of course the result is that we are given this mental picture, of being forced out of the country, or into some concentration camp, at gunpoint, while our relatives look on, saying, "We tried to warn you." If that image is not funny, and we do not laugh, we are accused of not having a sense of humor. I think a lot of mind control and self-censorship is being effected in this manner. We are afraid to speak out in public, afraid of ridicule from our relatives who have been coached in dismissive, disrespectful argument styles by Limbaugh for two decades. We don't know how to argue like that, and why would we want to, over Thanksgiving dinner? Turkey with a side of fear.