Mayhem at Townhalls: Not the Change We Needed

Mean-spiritedness and conflict were driving economic forces throughout the 1990s.  Today,  we can no longer afford either. 

Artist Shepherd Fairey's Change posters were an inspiration throughout the election season. Thus it is disturbing in the extreme to see such mean-spiritedness and ignorance at the Town Hall meetings.   These venues are a platform to facilitate intelligent and democratic debate; however, they are being used as a stage upon which to vent every kind of paranoia and ignorance. 

One can only wonder  if many people are aware of our system of government, our checks and balances, and the processes therein. The Hitler/Facsist/Socialist charges are tired, old, irrelevant, and bespeak a stupidity which borders on the hysterical. Clearly, the Obama administration are waging an uphill battle against a populace roused by right wing pundits, such as Limbaugh, Beck, Savage, and others, who are more interested in watching their ratings soar at the expense of badly needed health care reform,  than in educating people toward some sort of unity.

  The divisive culture wars are a product of the excess and greed of the 1990s.  Howe and Strauss  -  two of the clearest thinking scholars of our time  -  saw correctly more than a decade ago the power of factionalizing and fragmentation for market purposes.  During economic downshifts,  however,  this same polarizing effect  may be disatrous.  The rantings of a Rush Limbaugh belong to another time:  They are an echo from past;   the roaring '90s,  when a thriving economic engine could benefit from the fragmentation and splintering of our culture.  Today,  we live in  an opposing hour.  We can no longer afford  the hysteria or theatrics of the Culture War decade.  Those who have the ear which hears the changing tones of times and shifting political songs,  know that these are out of tune.  When pundits bent on ratings sing,  they sing alone.  No honest crowd answer them.  Only the remnants of the passing hour will reply to such divisive content. 

Obama's Change mantra has the power to stir up the greatest evil and the greatest good.  He himself must wonder,  when facing an almost ungovernable mass of  conflict:  Of ingratitude and valor,  lust and nobility, of intelligence and unintelligible bigotry,   which way the winds of fortune will blow.  Whether in his favor,  or to forces of opposition which are thriving 15 minutes too late,  tardily wailing  past their time;  arriving on the historical stage when their curtain is quickly coming down.