Wednesday, August 24, 2011

it is time to sit down

Is historical accuracy important to you? What about solving problems? Do you value compromise? Do you prefer logic and reason to the alternatives? Do you get angry when people offer up personal attacks and appeals to fear and anger in the place of rational arguments? Does it drive you nuts that no one ever admits making a mistake or takes responsibility for anything? If so, I want to offer you some reassurance and a challenge.

First of all, you aren’t alone. There are others who winced when Sarah Palin claimed that Paul Revere was warning the British, and then got plain old angry when she refused to admit her mistake and instead blamed the media. You aren’t the only one that wonders what constitution it is that Tea Party People are talking about since ours was written to replace a state-centered system with one where there was more federal power (maybe they are thinking about the Confederate constitution). Many of us wonder what “big government” is. Many of us wonder what you call a government where the elected representatives put the interests of their party above the interests of their country. Many of us wonder why the question of the President’s citizenship lingered as long as it did. Many of us wonder why politicians are stirring up so much hate and whether they have thought about the short and long term implications of their hate-mongering. Many of us wonder why the blame for the financial crisis seems to have moved from the poorly regulated financial sector to unions, big government, and retirees. Many of us wonder why the Nazis and the Fascists and the Soviets seem to come up so often in analogies and arguments made by American politicians against their American rivals. Many of us wonder why compromise has become a dirty word. No, you are not alone.

Unfortunately you are not alone in your response to all of this either. We sigh. We moan. We complain to each other. We occasionally write impassioned letters to the editor. We let fanatics dominate the conversation and set the agenda. The debate on the debt ceiling never should have been focused so much on taxes. The debate on health care was too much about death panels, abortion, and homosexuality. We also let our elected representatives, and those folks who are seeking to be our elected representatives, get away with giving us insults and hate in the place of rational arguments. We have only ourselves to blame for the mess we are in … and we are the only ones who can get ourselves out. So what can we do?

First of all, we can recognize that we are every type of people. We are PhDs and people who never graduated high school. We are black, white, Hispanic, Asian, African, and every alternative and combination you can think of. We are Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, and Atheist. We are poor and rich. A few of us are even still in the middle class. We are registered as Republicans, Democrats, and even Socialists (some people really are socialists). We are all of us.

Second, we can reoccupy our democracy and our history. We can stage a sit in. In fact, that could be our name. We could start the Sit In Movement. It’s a better historical touchstone then the Boston Tea Party (which by the way was about taxation without representation and not just taxation). It highlights that America wasn’t created as a perfect thing right out of the box. We have had to change it over the years to make it more inclusive, more effective, and just plain old better. That change hasn’t been easy, it’s required being right there in the middle of things, and we need some more of it. We need to get back in the middle of things. Every time someone makes a mistake and blames it on the press, we should be there to hold them accountable. Every time someone said that they will never compromise, we need to unceasingly and aggressively tell them that they are wrong. Every time people twist the truth or support their arguments with nothing but hate and nastiness, we must be there to tell them that we deserve more. Every time someone trots out tired and meaningless labels like fascist or communist, we have to shout them down and out until they come back with a different approach. We need to be the noisy ones. We need to be the annoying ones. We need to be making ourselves heard in every way and whenever possible.

The time has come to demand that our elected representatives focus on solving the problems facing the country. It’s time for us to demand explanations rather than slogans and clever put downs. Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to get off our feet and sit down.

No comments:

Post a Comment