We won a big one this week. All the hard work and phone calls of many, many people paid off. So many times over the last year HCR was declared DOA, and each time we resurrected it by acting like informed citizens, even in the face of the Teabaggers and astroturf, manufactured outrage. We’re starting to get the feel of governing again, slowly. Anthony Wiener and Alan Grayson are offering inspiration and lively entertainment, as well as templates for others to work from. Our median voter, Fred, may be confused from all the fireworks about exactly what happened, or what will happen now and how it will affect him, his family, his friends and his customers. He’s probably disgusted with all the hysteria and blatant lies and political posturing. But we have midterm elections coming up and more mopping up than ever after the mess that Republicans left us, and we need Fred, plus as many from his neighborhood as possible.
We need to start coming out from under the bed, set aside our defensive crouch and start contributing in a positive way to the national dialog to help get our country back on track. We need to correct the lies, educate those too young to have had either memories or decent history classes. We should be ridiculing the ridiculous, taking a parental tone and tactics with much of the childishness that’s been rampant on the national stage. And we need to communicate our perfectly reasonable expectations for basic, civil, adult conversations and actions without elevating or dignifying the childish behavior whenever possible. I think Fred and those in his circle are way past ready to have grownups stepping up and speaking out after all the hysteria and very troubling tone of potential violence taken by what used to be the Republican Party. The Coffee Party has interesting potential as a space for outreach to independents and disaffected moderate Republicans with the intent of building coalitions, I’m interested to see if it catches on or peters out.
I know I’m not quite older than dirt, but I’m getting there. How many remember the Highlights magazine as kids? The one with the little cartoons of Goofus and Gallant as examples of good and poor behavior? I think it may be time to revive that pair of characters and make positive use of them again. I propose a Goofus and Gallant ad campaign this year. The Neo-cons, Republicans and now the Tea Partiers have been using oversimplification of issues to produce attitudes and take advantage of faux and manufactured controversies for ages, let’s use a simplistic approach to point up A) All the myriad ways in which they’re being incredibly childish, and B) The consequences of bratty children running important things. A certain amount of shaming bratty children in public is very useful, and shaming adults who are acting like bratty children in pubic may be essential leverage in changing the behavior.
Our county has gotten so diverse in its media habits that we aren’t seeing the ubiquitous good role models and training tools like Goofus and Gallant or characters like those in ‘The Courtship of Eddie’s Father’, to pattern behavior after. Is it any surprise then that an awful lot of people don’t seem to know how to act? Or recognise the long term consequences of shortsighted, childish behavior? Maybe we should bring back Goofus and Gallant to lay some ground rules. God knows that the Republicans are giving us ample models for Goofus. Maybe we should start really paring down the rhetoric to basics like ‘Hypocrisy is bad.’ ‘Selfishness is bad for everyone around it.’ ‘Poor sportsmanship is bad’, because those concepts haven’t been enunciated, much less emphasised since many of us were kids. Whole generations following us had virtually no exposure to that foundation unless it happened to be modeled in their own families. And there was no longer any common infrastructure to help recruit and train kids on the fringes whose parents didn’t model good behavior. There’s plenty of research showing that the recognition of fairness and equitable actions are innate in our species and manifest from a very early age. We could start with these basics and work up to ‘The Nazis and Fascists were the bad guys, did horrible things and we still gave them trials and jail terms because this is the grownup way of doing things.’
And then, for instance, do web ads juxtaposing ‘Taxes are bad’,‘Tax cuts for everyone’, etc, with the Minnesota bridge collapse. ‘Government regulation is bad’ with the peanut butter recall or other food contamination incident. “Banks don’t need regulating’ with images of credit cards and thugs with baseball bats and kneecaps. Politicians (with date stamps) vociferously arguing both sides of an issue. Basic stuff. Clear cause and effect. Show how selfish/partisan/shortsighted the current opposition is and point up the consequences of their attitudes and actions with high contrast, graphic cases in point.
This kind of basic, Goofus and Gallant/Schoolhouse Rock approach, quick, catchy, graphic, instantly recognisable and easily understood is a winner for defining the problems (and consequences) and clearing the water that the R’s and nutcases have purposely muddied in order to hijack governance and get their way at the expense of most Americans. And I have been seeing that some of the media has been noting the striking resemblance to screaming toddler behavior. Finally. Even Boehner had the sense to tell his side to ‘act like grownups’, for all the good that it did. We need to start writing more LTE's pointing out the flaws in hysterical arguments. I've considered starting a local bulletin board type blog since the local paper has very little in the way of opinion or interactive space. A few bumper stickers starting to pop up here and there with catchy phrases,
Not Socialist, Just Neighborly
Ballots, not Bullets/ Democracy= Ballots, Not Bullets
Democrats-Saying Yes to the Future
No Tantrums/No Tantrum Zone
New Time Czars- Time Out and Nap Time
‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’
Matthew 25 ‘That which you have done to the least…
Throw out a few bible verses, make them look'em up (also possibly a bit safer, by the time they look it up, you can be quite some ways away). So sad, and infuriating, that some of us may actually have to seriously consider personal safety issues when deciding to speak freely. In our own country. In 2010.
We need to start standing up and reclaiming the expectation of good faith behavior, publicly reclaiming something approaching actual Christianity for those of us so inclined. Reframe the garbage that's been tossed out there into something with a more realistic perspective,such as, Not Socialist’, Just Neighborly’ How’s that? neighborly like Bedford Falls, where folks are in it together and take care of each other. When I was growing up, if someone skinned a knee, whoever’s house was the closest was where we went to get a band-aid, that was neighborly. I agree with keeping the snark pressure up by pointing out our ‘socialist’ fire depts, police depts, road depts and how paying taxes to a central place allows us to take advantage of an economy of scale and makes our dollars go father than it would if we had to pave our own sections of our streets, (and you know that there’d be at least one jerk neighbor who wouldn’t keep up his section, who’d leave it potholed with mud and gravel and mess up your car’s suspension. You KNOW there’d be at least one of those in every neighborhood). We could start emphasizing the Bedford Falls vs Potterville meme, we’re all in it together, we’re invested in each other, let's make this work.