Hold that thought.
What came to mind for you when you read the title of this diary. What reaction did you have, personal or historical. What images or memories came to mind?
I am trying to understand more about the common threads of the tea-baggers, and Beck's motley crew. Glenn Beck's 9/12 project identified 9 principles that, he says, "must be lived by". The first, and I would think foremost, of those principles is simply:
America is Good
This is quite curious to me, especially in the relationship it has to the 3 questions that Beck uses in his Mission Statement to troll for and identify his minions:
* Do you watch the direction that America is being taken in and feel powerless to stop it?
* Do you believe that your voice isn’t loud enough to be heard above the noise anymore?
* Do you read the headlines everyday and feel an empty pit in your stomach…as if you’re completely alone?
"...as if you're completely alone." What a powerful push this is to organize the disaffected, the isolated, the impotent feeling, the psychological fringe. How can America be good if they have come to feel this way? Or is it that these are the only people that can represent America, and they alone are, as Hannity would say, the great great great Americans?
The ever ringing chants of "USA, USA" at these demonstrations seems only to be an affirmation that these people are "true" Americans, but that they are the only Americans. No room for diversity and, hence, no room for democracy here.
For my part, no country is either good or bad. And all countries have, at some point in time, committed bad acts. We are certainly not without stain in this regard. It is dangerous to march blindly to the beat that your country is, by its very existence, good. That's usually when the worst acts get committed.
So that's the kind of conversation I'd like to have with these tea-baggers, or town-hallies, or 9/12ers, or 10th-ers, or whatever you want to call them.
Is America good? Who decides that? Are we majority rule?
Take it from there.