Violence on the Right: The article by Paul Krugman today in the NYT is EXCELLENT (link below). No, we do not have rationality of thought ruling most especially the airwaves and the computer media. The appearance of anonymity allows in some cases the speaker and writer to think he/she can say almost anything and get away with it. I continue to wonder if it has always been this way and if American politics was infused from the beginning with a kind of lawless OK Corral, Wyatt Earp, Old West mentality. I think that is the case, at least, in part. OK Corral and Wyatt Earp, though, stayed part of historical lore. No one REALLY knows, to this day, the truth behind it and certainly the whole nation at that time did not know instantly about it. Our age gives instant verifiable vulgarity which EVERYONE can read, see and hear from Kansas to Pakistan in a nanosecond. There is a big difference between an age in which communication was primitive to the sophisticated media of visual experience and sound today. The kind of lethal weaponry we posses in this era, too, was not seen even in the Old West.
In my opinion, the most vituperative epithets are being hurled by the right wing against the party in power occupied at the helm by a black man. I do not remember the left wing, supremely critical of George Bush, resorting to the threat of secession and revolution despite George Bush leading a nation into a war based on lies with the attendant killing of over 4000 of its finest youth and the decimating a foreign nation for nothing.
In my opinion, there is a basic humanity within American leftist thought in which the violent ends justifies the means philosophy is iterated by only a very few. The right has as its essence an anger and mean-spirited violence which does NOT have a basic humanitarian ideology at its core. The only message from the right, to me, is hate MOST especially if the opposition is composed of many who are not white.
The extremist right wing is the most dangerous of political movements I have seen in my lifetime. It spawned the Oklahoma bombing, NUMEROUS so called lone wolf killings and anti-government actions stretching over decades. With guns as its love and its militias as its force, I believe, we have reason to fear many on the right including their institutional leaders who cheer them on.
However, I believe the right should be careful. They should not think their opposition will be nonreactive if assaulted most ESPECIALLY if, God forbid, anything were to happen to its leadership. As Japan said about America in 1941, America it is a sleeping giant. For now the giant on the left sleeps but it can be awoken at a moment's notice. The incendiary rhetoric and violence of both political wings should STOP and stop now before that giant awakens and the ramifications of that become much more serious for our nation and everyone who lives in it!
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/26/opinion/26krugman.html
