Words are powerful. You can take a word and make it a whole identity of it's own. The things we call people can bring them together, even if the term seems to be something more divisive than anything else. I'm looking squarely down the twin barrels of the new fringe element groups, "deathers" and "birthers."
I hope you enjoy.
People can be rather foolish sometimes, and it's helpful to have terms that correctly classify their behavior. When someone says "Two plus two equals five," you can show them how they are wrong. Once you show them how they're wrong and they still insist on the validity of their claim, you can change your classification from simply "mistaken" to "not only mistaken but pig-headed too." While it seems like a fun game to give such idiots neat little titles like "birthers" or "deathers," what you end up doing is not correcting bad behavior but rather encouraging it, because you've just given these people a support group. Namely, each other.
By calling these hard-headed idiots "birthers" and "deathers," we've vilified them, made them feel like an oppressed minority. I'm rather surprised that more of these men accustomed to the era of white privilege haven't been more vocal, unless you count Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Pat Buchanan. None of these people have read the health care bill, and I've yet to hear someone say they've read all of it. Nonetheless, the claims of these idiots qua "deathers" have been substantiated to the point that end-of-life counseling has been pulled from the draft of the bill, even though it had NOTHING TO DO WITH DEATH PANELS.
"Oh hey did you see Obama's Kenyan birth certificate?"
"No, because he doesn't have one. He was born in Hawaii, and this was settled during his Presidential campaign. Why are you bringing this up again?"
"Because they found the real one! He was born in Kenya!"
"That was done with Photoshop, and Kenya wasn't a country when he was born."
"They're just lying about his age then, too."
You can see how this can be frustrating, much how I feel the Project for a New America must have felt when "crazy lefties" accused the members of orchestrating the 9/11 attacks. See? It just sounds crazy! But now the Democrats are in office so it's different. Or is it?
The right lost something special to them, and it wasn't the respect of the American people. They lost that before through years of mismanagement. No, it was their power, and now that they lost that they are looking not to search within and discern what it was about their behavior to make the American people turn away from them, but to obfuscate, lie, and plain make shit up so that they don't have to face reality.
Just like those loony lefties before them, the fringe right, those pigheaded morons that voted for Sarah Palin and actually think she's a smart woman, those people who believe the Kenyan certificate is real, those stupid people that think Obama is going to cut off Grandma's chemotherapy, are not any one of these made-up names or categories. They are just stupid, and like an idiot backed into a corner, will only scream until you concede. You didn't admit the idiot was right, but they see you backing down and see it as a victory.
Make no mistake. If the narrative continues to be dominated by us reasonably trying to explain things when all they want to do is pout and scream and make noise, they will win the health care debate, because it's having an effect on public opinion. That doesn't make it smart. It doesn't make the far-right crazies "right," but they see it that way.
Until we all have the courage to look these people in the eye and tell them that they are flat-out wrong, that they are stupid to believe these things that have no basis in reality, then they will continue to act like the kindergartners that broke their teacher down into tears.
If we let the idiots win this debate then why did we try so hard to throw them out of office?