A Last Gasp, I Hope

It is the most gorgeous Sunday morning, early autumn. We've been keeping the windows open, and it's a little cool in the house this morning. I went out and mowed the yard and hardly broke a sweat.

We're not a political web site, I personally am not especially partisan and don't understand a lot about what goes on in the smoke-filled rooms, but you can't help paying attention as the national conversation unfolds, especially as it relates to the battles we have fought in our own county. We are lucky to live in a place where people are good and open-minded, open-hearted, they may not understand why you are the way you are but they accept it and trust that you're being honest about it. But even in Montgomery County there are a few people who can't do that, people who feel it is their duty to attack differences. They think their narrow way of life is the only acceptable way to be.

In the past few weeks we have seen something bizarre happening on the national stage, something that reflects and magnifies what we have seen in our county over the past few years. The Republican candidates have begun to attract crowds of people who believe that it's all right, even funny, to talk about murdering the Democratic candidate for president. The Republicans have insinuated that Brack Obama is a terrorist, or at least "pals around" with terrorists. I saw a video of people going into a rally, and the interviewer asked them, "Do you think Barack Obama is a terrorist?" And a lot said yes. He asked them why they thought that. "Look at his name," they said.

It's as simple as that. He has a weird name, a foreign-sounding name, an Arabic-sounding name, and that makes him a terrorist. He's different from us. That's all it takes.

These are people who can't tell the difference between reality and a cartoon.

I have a friend who divides the world into two kinds of people. Some people assume everybody is similar to them and are surprised when they discover differences. Other people assume that everybody is different and then are surprised by similarities. I'm more like that second kind. You've heard me say before, I wouldn't even want other people to be like me. I'm not sure I could stand to be around myself, and I wouldn't recommend thinking this way, it's not only frustrating but mostly ineffective.

But some people expect everybody else to think the way they do, act the way they do, feel like them. And when you don't it annoys them. These people put a lot of pressure on one another to conform -- they may call themselves "individualists" or whatever, but they do it in unison. And when you get them together in a crowd it is possible to stir them up emotionally by pointing out someone who seems to differ from them.

The Republicans are struggling now, nobody wants to have four more years of embarrassment and failure like the last eight. At first the candidates tried to distinguish themselves from the current regime, but it didn't work very well, so now they're going the other way, they're working the crowd in ways that you hoped no American would ever do. Interestingly, the name "George Wallace" has come up quite a few times recently. You hoped we wouldn't go back to that, but you were overly optimistic.

It's hard to imagine how this was supposed to work. Here's Gail Collins in the New York Times Thursday:

The Republican campaign strategy now involves sending their candidates to areas where everybody is a die-hard McCain supporter already. Then they yell about Obama until the crowd is so frenzied people start making threats. The rest of the country is supposed to watch and conclude that this would be an enjoyable way to spend the next four years. Dear Old Golden Dog Days

While I was writing this, someone pasted a good quote into a comment here. Frank Rich has an amazing column this morning, in the NYT, where he talks about fears that Barack Obama will be assassinated:

At McCain-Palin rallies, the raucous and insistent cries of "Treason" and "Terrorist" and "Kill him" and "Off with his head" as well as the uninhibited slinging of racial epithets, are actually something new in a campaign that has seen almost every conceivable twist. They are alarms. Doing nothing is not an option. The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama

We have seen, in our little suburban county, the anger of those who demand that everybody should be like them. They turned on our school district when the board voted to teach students about sexual orientation without preaching against homosexuality, and the exact same people turned on the County Council when they voted to adopt a law granting equal rights to people regardless of gender identity. One tiny gang of angry people has created quite a bit of turbulence here and cost quite a bit of money, fighting against the diversity that nature has blessed us with. We remember a leader of the Republican Party standing up in a County Council meeting and shouting "Heil Hitler," then saying "Wait until little girls start showing up dead all over the county because of freaks of nature," because the Council had just voted to prohibit discrimination against transgender people. The fear, the anger, the hatred have been bubbling along at a low boil in communities like ours across the country, and now it is spilling over at these campaign rallies.

The good news is that it's not working. The haters are still a minority in our country, but my God, look how powerful they have become! We have a two-party political system, and they have taken over one of the parties at the national level. You hope their effect will wane, that people will go back to taking care of their own business, and there are signs that the Bush years have taken the wind out of their sails, but there is still a lot of residual hatred in the country. I hope this presidential campaign will go down in the history books as the last gasp of an element that America will not be proud of. In the meantime, Frank Rich is right: doing nothing is not an option.