Revisiting the Path of Fear...

[sfwriter]

Hi all,

I reached post #1000 just over a year ago. In wake of the shooting, I think it is worth revisiting that post.

Did Sarah Palin cause the shooting? She wishes she were that powerful. She is merely an echo of a much meaner streak running on the right. I trace it here in the context of a year or go. It stands largely unchanged.

-sandy

Post 1000: The path of fear.


"Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering"

-Yoda, Jedi Master


So this is it. Post number 1000. It took me 8 years to get here. I've been told I'm a taciturn son-of-a-gun by fellow Democratic Underground posters who rack up a "1K" status in six months. I was never a prolific poster, but hopefully a thoughtful and insightful voice in the community we have built here.


I've gotten amazing support from this community. I've shared the joys and sorrows of DU members as they have been through birth and death, and DUers have shared mine as well. For post 1000, I'm going to take you for a walk down the path of my darkest fears.


I came to DU early, before the towers fell in March of 2001. The whiff of the jackboot was already in the air. The media had rolled over and Bush and company were looking for an excuse to "test" the constitution. If you are young enough not to remember those days of fear, you are lucky. Be vigilant though. They could return at any time.


Thanks to the old Wayback Machine, I can share some of that here:




Yup, that's what DU looked like 8 years ago.


I was fresh off a bitter campaign fight. I was reluctant to post my name after death threats from a Republican foe at Politics.com. The nitwit emailed me pictures of his gun collection for a while and then started sending me pictures of a woman in San Francisco he had decided was me. That was the last straw. I called the cops and quit using my name online. After a visit from the SFPD, He promptly disappeared from online life as well. It wasn't until November of 2006 that I started signing my actual name here.


A year ago, some right-wing murderer, hopped up on Michael Savage and Bill O'Reilly walked into the Unitarian church in my home town of Knoxville, TN and opened fire. I knew 19 people in those pews, and 8 years earlier, when I lived there, they were not Unitarians. They had been Methodists, Jews, Atheists, and Baptists if they bothered to label themselves at all. Why were they all there in those UU pews?


The only common thread I have found is that the evaporating pool of empathy in our society had driven them to a place where hate wouldn't flow from the pulpit. They sought out a place to make common cause with rationality and wisdom. That day in July, a man bereft of both reason and sanity opened fire.


You can read his manifesto here:

http://web.knoxnews.com/pdf/021009church-manifesto.pdf


I joined my local UU congregation in solidarity. We've had our signs and flags vandalized every three months or so for the last year. Our foes are cowards. They always strike in the night. Until now, it had been pretty general hatred. They would steal the gay pride flag. That's fine guys, really, we buy them by the case.


Two weeks ago,they slapped Obama Socialism signs on the church. This barometer of rage shows me that the health care propaganda is having its effect. Until now, they had satisfied themselves with simple vandalism. This was the first attack directed at an issue.


The News-Leader letter is here:

http://www.news-leader.com/article/20090813/OPINIONS/908130344/1006/Roses-&-Thorns


Our routine vandalism isn't worthy of a news story. I've been told we bring it on ourselves for being so "divisive." I've replied that we stand on the side of love. My rhetorical, "Where do you stand?" goes unanswered.


A few months after the Knoxville shooting, another right-wing murderer walked into a church and shot George Tiller over the issue of abortion. More hate, this time fed by men like Randall Terry, drove this shooting. You can see Terry's vocal support of continuing the fight here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/01/randall-terry-tiller-reap_n_209862.html


Then, the hate erupted again at the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. The shooter reeked of paranoia according to the Kansas City Star.

"He said his Social Security had been cut and that he was barely making it," de Nugent said. "He felt it was the direct result of someone in Washington looking at his Web site."

The election of Obama made him snap. Todd Blodgett is an acquaintance of the shooter. He is also a protege of Lee Atwater and former Regan White House aide turned white supremacist. In that latter capacity he said the shooter hated black people and hated Jews, but if he had to pick one to kill, it would be the Jews.

It's all here:

http://primebuzz.kcstar.com/?q=node/18841


Now in the health care debate, I see men calling for revolution. I see Freepers talking of rebellion. I see armed men flaunting their weapons amongst unarmed crowds while they talk about "taking their country back."


This is my greatest fear, that fed on lies, bereft of reason, there is a powder keg of hate just waiting to erupt on the right. It would be paranoia if it wasn't so well documented. The Southern Poverty Law Center has released a report on the return of the militias. See it here:

http://www.splcenter.org/images/dynamic/main/The_Second_Wave.pdf


There is a 400 percent rise in death threats against the president since bush left office according to Ronald Kessler, author of In the President's Secret Service. Among the plots was one in Tennessee that called for the conspirators to "rob a gun store, shoot 88 black people, decapitate another 14 and then assassinate the first black president in American history." You can see that story here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/5967942/Barack-Obama-faces-30-death-threats-a-day-stretching-US-Secret-Service.html


You really can't be surprised after the way Sarah Palin got them going during the campaign. As in the infamous event here:

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/10/14/another-mccain-palin-supporter-yells-kill-him-about-obama/


Palin supporters are on the leading edge of the anger wave. upon hearing of an anti-palin rally during last year's campaign, right wing KBYR talk radio host Eddie Burke lost his mind on air shouting "They're a bunch of socialist maggots, that's what I'm going to call them -- socialist maggots, that's what they are, a bunch of socialist baby-killing maggots," said Burke.

See it here:

http://www.ktuu.com/Global/story.asp?S=8996315


Notice the perfect uniformity of that message through the cries of "socialism" around the health care debate today. It is to the point that Republican legislators, like US House Representative Wally Herger, of California’s 2nd congressional district are actually voicing encouragement to this behavior. Herger "expressed “enthusiastic approval” of a town-hall attendee who described himself as a “proud right-wing terrorist,” according to the Redding Record Searchlight. See it here:
http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/08/22/gop-rep-right-wing-terrorist/

There is a growing and persistent meme on the right that a civil war is coming. It pops up in bad science fiction from authors who have walked off into the abyss like this notable excrement from Orson Scott Card:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_%282006_novel%29

My review of Empire at Democratic Underground is here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x1066923

You see this same meme in posts on the Internet at places like Free Republic and even Yahoo Answers as seen here: (be sure to read the comments)
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090818174027AAFDeXE

Particularly chilling is the central misconception that liberals would be particularly easy marks. That pops up in Empire. The UU shooter voiced surprise that he only got three shots off in a room full of pacifists, he had brought over 70 shotgun shells and expected to use them all. This is a quote from the comments in the Yahoo Answers link above.

"I think that Obama and the liberals will just quietly fade out.

If a violent uprising does start, I'm packing black clothes, a black ski mask, night vision goggles, and a few hand weapons. I'll get a few of my marine buddies together and we'll form a splinter op group.

And who do you think seriously would win? The gun-wielding, macho conservatives (many of them former marines, soldiers, etc.) or the perfume-wearing liberal wussies?"

See what I mean? Of course the Confederate generals thought the Civil War would end in weeks. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfield said the Iraqis would greet us as liberators. Our assumptions about our enemies or opponents, political or otherwise, ALWAYS need to be examined.

The drum beat for violence is strong enough and constant enough that Homeland Security has issued a warning here:
http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/rightwing.pdf

And FoxNews has of course issued a denial. While glorifying every weaponized winger at these town halls and broadcasting Glen Beck's calls to take the country back, they deny it is having any effect. See here:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/08/11/evidence-supporting-claims-rightwing-extremism-report-lacks-depth-group-says/

The FoxNews spin is that the DHS evidence amounts to no more than "just a bunch of links." That's basically what I have provided here for my 1000th post, just a bunch of links, nothing more, but they give shape to my greatest fear. We've been here before you know as a drumbeat of right wing hate radio and abortion shootings gave way to bombings in the 1990s. How do we break this chain of willful ignorance before these shootings turn into bombings this time?

If my first 1000 posts here at DU are capped by my fears, here's hoping that the next 1000 can find a solution to our mutual problem of communication on the right and the left here in America. I've never seen the reality distortion field set this high. As a friend of mine said when I commented that "this will end in violence," If it comes to that, violence will will not be an end, but a beginning.

I've seen it from threats of violence in my email box, vandalism at my church or madmen gunning for my friends. It's a path I do not wish to take.

You may think that my opening with a Star Wars quote was a lark, but I think there is truth in that formula. Fear is at the root of the hate and anger. Watch how powerful interests are using it right now with talk of "killing grandma." Lobbyists, talk show hosts and politicians terrorize the masses and harvest their political bounty with utter disregard for the consequences of that fear.

Understanding how to defuse fear may be the best skill we can learn. How else do we neutralize the those that prey on the fearful?

Thanks for the support and encouragement DU. Here's hoping we can find a solution before I hit 2k somewhere at the end of Obama's second term. ;-)

All the best,

--
Sandy Clark - Writer - Geek - Dad
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg