What Lurks Within: Protest's Silent Partner

This debate is not about health care, and we’d be foolish to think that it is.Health care acts as the guise for something much more hideous, deep-seated, and foul. It manifests itself through coded languages: the loaded gun strapped to the leg of a New Hampshire protester outside a presidential town hall; the swastika painted outside a Georgia congressman’s office; the infamous disgruntled woman who sobbed that she wanted her America back; or the use of “socialist” as a variation of the “n” word.

At these town halls, we have witnessed the opportunism of racial animus rear its poisonous fangs through white Americans who viciously air their race-based grievances of the past election under the coded veil of health care reform. 

And these meetings have all but mirrored traditional clan rallies (without the white sheets) with a Hawaiian birth certificate and a H.R. 3200 serving as substitutes for a burning cross.

Let us not kid ourselves; we know all too well what this right-wing talk of birth certificates, tax-funded abortions, death panels, and euthanasia will bring — some thirty death threats per day to the first African-American President of the United States, only seven months into his first-term.

Sure, Sen. Grassley (R-IA), Chairman Dick Armey of Freedomworks, Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, and Rush Limbaugh will pretend that they are not stoking the attack of the lone wolf — the assassin – or pointing the lynch mob toward the noose, but we know differently. We can all predict where this hate-speech will lead our nation — to the abysmal asylums of Oswald, Roeder, Manson, Ray, McVeigh, and von Brunn.

Surely, we cannot deny that this rhetoric from the fringe may incite a day not unlike Friday, November 22, 1963 or Thursday, April 4, 1968, with scenes of mayhem not unlike Dealey Plaza or the Lorraine Motel, respectively. And the sick soul who bears a self-induced glory from the barrel of his gun will await his praise and crucifixion while the American History textbooks are re-written to decry his name.

Clearly, a noisy gathering of armed protesters outside a presidential convention in Phoenix is not a demonstration in Second Amendment advocacy, but a demonstration in the second beginning of the Waco Siege. It reminded us of the southern lynch mobs of the late fifties (minus one token) who showed up with shot guns and ropes after getting word of the locally jailed Civil Rights worker from the north.

In this regard, President Obama is our Civil Rights leader, and where the issue in 1959 would’ve been about voting rights, the issue now is about health care. Nothing more could ever be made of this right-wing fabricated dissent where it becomes increasingly clear that to take up arms against health care reform is to take up arms against the President.

It would not be hyperbole to suggest that a foolish political strategy infused with irrational rhetoric could lead to the harm of our leaders, and ultimately an ignition of riotous tensions and violence akin to that which we saw in 1968, that is, if it is not stopped. Lest we not take David Koresh, Scott Roeder, James von Brunn, and William Kostric to be omens in disguise.

Make no mistake about it, if such an atrocity were ever to haunt our days, Republicans and their right-wing conservative fringe would be guilty, but the media would be even guiltier. The massively televised corporate media apparatus has given the hate-speech of the American town hall its own platform with more distribution and legitimacy than it deserves. And that just can’t go on unnoticed.

As to whether town halls are legitimate tools of democracy, I answer by pointing you to the New Hampshire protester who carried the sign that read “It Is Time To Water The Tree of Liberty,” a reference to a quote by Thomas Jefferson who said that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” a slogan also written on Timothy McVeigh’s t-shirt on the day he bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.