The Politics of Hatred

I received an email earlier this summer, a racist rant that was (mistakenly) attributed to Michael Richards (Kramer from Seinfeld). You might remember that he got into a bit of trouble a few years ago for yelling out racial epithets at a concert. So someone got the bright idea to attach his name to their racist musings, and pass them off as his. This has been debunked by Snopes.com, but it served another purpose for me. It sent me down the path of thought that made me question just where all the hate is coming from? It is so pervasive in our society now, that it feels as though there is no escaping it.

Nowhere, though, is it worse than in our political realm. Think of the last five Presidents. Only George Bush Sr. doesn't engender a passionate response from one side or the other. Reagan was despised by the Left, loved by the Right. Clinton was the exact opposite, only more so. Then came W., and the hatred reached new levels (and by the end, he was hated by both the Left, and most of his own party). Now there's Obama, and the politics of hate have reached their zenith. There is a relatively new Harris poll that shows that 25% of Republicans believe that Obama is the Antichrist. Seriously. That goes into my all-time list of favorite poll statistics, right next to the 40% of Americans who believe their retirement money will be coming from winning the lottery. (Of course, in this economy, that might not be such a bad bet)

Listen, I'm disappointed in Obama as well. He rode a wave of hope and optimism into office, only to seemingly give up on that simply because the other side of the aisle didn't want to play nice. So he caved, and that promise of hope went by the wayside, as he tried to fight his battles with the same tactics that everyone else was already using. He can't, and he shouldn't, but he does it anyway.

I get so discouraged when I think of Obama. Not because I think he's a bad man, in fact, it's exactly the opposite. I think he's a great man, but one who was unprepared for what he was stepping into. I think he failed to realize just how divided we are as a country right now. "Red" America and "Blue" America might as well be the Bloods and the Crips. Same colors, same level of hatred for one another. There is no easy way out of this, and Obama should have realized that.

People are scared right now. The economy sucks, unemployment is through the roof, everything costs more, and 99% of the people don't know how they're going to afford the things they need. That's an easy group to manipulate. But I truly believe that if you give people a choice between being motivated by fear, and being motivated by hope, most of them will chose hope. That's why Obama got elected in the first place. It was the basic message of his campaign: Hope. Now it's all fear again, from both sides, and the people like me who want hope, and want to believe, are out of luck.

You know what I really wanted from Obama? I wanted Ghandi. I wanted someone who would stand there while the Glenn Becks and Rush Limbaughs of the world hurled insults and invective at him, and just take it. I wanted someone who would take the political Machiavellianism that is so rampant in Washington right now, and just rise above it. Who would look at the scheming and backstabbing and not stoop to that level, no matter what. Yes, he would be beaten down; I wanted someone who would stand back up and say, "Go ahead, knock me down again". Because that's really the only way out of this, folks. It does not take courage to take a beating. It takes courage to get back up and take another one.

I'm discouraged because if one of the smartest, most principled men in Washington, who was elected on a platform of hope and bipartisanship, can't rise above the politics of hatred, who can? Certainly not a Republican, and there isn't a Democrat out there with enough of a spine to do it. I worry that it only gets worse from here, with no end in sight.

We cannot continue down this path, as there is no happy ending here. We have to learn to rise above as individuals, and eventually we can rise above as a nation. Because right now we're mired in the muck, and unless we do something about it, we're only going to sink.

I find myself drifting back to the words in JFK's inauguration speech: Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. And I believe that what we can all do is to turn away from hate and intolerance, and turn towards love and light. Even knowing that we will get knocked down, if we have the courage to get back up, we will prevail in the end.