I know a teabagger.
She’s actually a little afraid to come out to me as one, but I know she is. And she knows that I know that she knows that I know she is.
She says she’s a devout Christian. She strongly supports same-sex marriage, and is teaching her daughter to support and defend the rights of minorities. She swears up and down she’s not racist. She works for the government in public health, and helps some of the most judged and reviled people in our country try to live healthier lives. She also deeply admires men and women who join the military and commit to defending our country – she’s the child of a military family, and married a veteran.
What she lacks, it seems, are critical thinking skills. I’ve been trying to come to some idea of why.
We first worked together, then became friends, and I’ve always known she was susceptible to misinformation. She’s the kind of woman who forwards scary "fact"-laden emails without checking snopes.com (or common sense) first. This, of course, makes her a perfect audience for Faux News. People who take what they’re told as unquestionable truth, without checking sources, and without comparing this information with their values or even asking basic questions, are easy targets for shysters.
She lives in North Carolina. During the recent presidential election, I worked extra hard on opening her mind to voting for Obama, since she lives in a state I was certain was in play (and was it ever!). She, in turn, made a half-hearted effort to turn me toward McCain. Now, during the primaries, I was a Hillary gurl, and my friend seemed interested in Senator Clinton’s candidacy. But she simply could not stomach Barack Obama as president of the United States.
The interplay was interesting, to say the least.
In one conversation, I pointed out Senator McCain’s exceptionally poor voting record on supporting veterans and soldiers, even though he, himself, was a veteran. She said my source was "just a blogger". I pointed out that her sources wrote blogs, too (Drudge, anyone?). No response.
At a different moment, knowing I found Senator Obama’s positions and actions with regard to LGBT people suspect, she told me I shouldn’t vote for Senator Obama because "he doesn’t support gay marriage EITHER!" I asked her what, if any, civil rights advances for LGBT people Senator McCain supported. No response. I asked her when a party nominee in the past had supported same-sex marriage. No response. I asked if Senator McCain supported any of her values on equality.
No response.
But I knew we were headed in a strange direction when she questioned Senator Obama’s citizenship. Have I mentioned that my friend was born in Hawai’i?
Eventually, we came to a point at which I had to ask, "_______, we have serious problems confronting the nation, and this is the question that you just can’t get out of your head?" Never you mind that Senator McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, which I pointed out to...you guessed it...no response. After that, I refused to discuss it with her, and asked her to simply choose other conversation topics.
After that, she decided maybe we shouldn’t discuss politics.
Now, of course, we’re friends on Facebook (I have been assimilated by the Borg), and there have been times when she has posted things on which I could not stay quiet. I’ve crossed swords with other friends of hers who are similar, to some extent. My friend, to her credit, often ends these threads with "thank you for challenging me – it keeps my mind open!" – even if perhaps it doesn’t. But her husband’s insurance premiums have gone up since healthcare reform passed – and you know who she blamed. It must be the Democrat law that made this happen – not the insurance company’s greed. And you can’t imagine she and her friends’ glee at Scott Brown’s election. I didn’t have the heart to ask them what they thought of his first vote in the Senate – to bring cloture for a bill she and her friends would have vehemently opposed.
In the profile I’ve drawn of a woman who is, in my experience, a loving mother, devoted wife, kind and selfless friend, a caring public health worker who tries hard to bring good to everyone, I also see a couple of other things the impact of which I’ve never fully considered. As a devout Christian and a member of a military family, she has two experience bases which may have taught her not to question. Many conservative Christians I know have been taught not to question. My impression of the military is that its members (and by extension perhaps their families) are also taught not to question, but to follow the authority without considering the direction before following the order.
In both of those cases, all of the people I’ve seen as part of this movement have been white, and it seems clear they long for a time in this country that’s been created out of a hazy past. This halcyon time, if they thought back to the actual time period in their lives and how things really were, wasn’t all that great. As Billy Joel sang, "The good old days weren’t always good," but there’s this failure to remember that on the part of these people. There’s this failure to even read about what really happened, and how things really worked "back in the day".
I have found her – and other teabagger types – not to be uneducated or ignorant on issues. Many are of reasonable or even above-average intelligence, in spite of the incredibly laughable signs we’ve seen at some rallies and clearly (sadly) idiotic viewpoints expressed by some of the crazies. What I end up coming up with is willful ignorance of the past and present, which I find scary and repugnant. I worry when otherwise good, kind people are willfully ignorant. It leads to disconnects between the good and vicious sides of human beings, because people forget to think about what they’re doing before it’s too late.
I become very concerned when the direction of things goes from "they know not what they do" to "they don’t want to know what they do".
I think my friend might just be aware enough to know what she does, because I think she’s too ashamed to come out to me as a teabagger. I think it’s possible that she knows it doesn’t look good on her. But I also think that shame can be muted by deciding to ignore the vicious nature of the political movement with which she sympathizes.
I know a teabagger.