The Tone of the Talk

This week Nancy Pelosi said something that has been on my mind, too, and doubtless a lot of people are growing concerned about the tenor of our nation's dialogue. I only finally watched the video just now, you can see it HERE. From the descriptions and discussion, I figured she'd broken down weeping, but really her voice is even, her sentences are carefully and well formed, she has tears in her eyes, that's it.

Pelosi was in San Francisco at the time Harvey Milk was assassinated, and she has compared the tone of today's talk to that. Here is the core of her comment:

"I wish that we would all, again, curb our enthusiasm in some of the statements that are made, understanding that -- that some of the people -- the ears it is falling on are not as balanced as the person making the statement might assume."

I think this was overly generous, I'd say that people like Glenn Beck are just as nutty as the people who listen to them, she is giving them more credit than I would.

Something has started to happen, even here on our blog, that worries me a lot. Certainly in the five years TTF has been busy we have been embroiled in controversies, that's what we're here for, to fight over issues that involve our community, to promote values that we think are important, in the face of outspoken opposition. The other side has always played dirty, starting in the first month when they bought the dot-com version of our domain name, which ends with dot-org, and pointed it at their own site. (Try it: http://www.teachthefacts.com.) Over the years we have tracked and documented the lies, the misconstruals, the nuttiness of the other side, and they have complained about us, and that's the way it works. It happens that our view is the majority position in our county and also courts and boards have decided in our side's favor in the long run, but whatever, there are two sides and we fight it out.

Lately in the blog comments, though, there has been a new level of sentiment. Several times recently, commenters have said that my posts here, or my beliefs, are "evil."

This sounds to me like the voice of desperation. The religious right won some elections, at one point they owned the federal government -- the executive, legislative, judicial branches, all of it. But the people in this democratic country held an honest election and turned things around, now there are liberals in Congress and the White House, and the Supreme Court may shift further during this President's term. Now the other side is screeching that they "want their country back." And, you know, they're tough, they fight hard, they might be able to win an election again, that's how you get it back. You don't do it simply by disrupting meetings and lying on television, we'll have an election in a couple of years and if the people don't like who's in office now they'll elect somebody else.

When you call somebody evil you suck the life out of them, you treat them as a shell, not a person. It's okay to punish evil people, it's okay to kill them, they aren't real people, they aren't good people like you and me, they're bad people. I think that in a fundamentalist Christian context when you say somebody is evil you are saying that they are doing the work of the devil, and in the Bible those who go against God's will are often put to death through some horrible means, stoning or whatever.

I don't like to talk about this. I should be able to write on a blog about sex ed and nondiscrimination bills in a suburban county without fearing for my life. In a free society this should never cross my mind, I am not advocating for anything other than an open mind and open discussion, and I shouldn't have to worry that antipatriotic members of our community feel I'm evil, for crying out loud.

Granted, a lightweight version of this kind of sentiment has existed all along, that really has been the problem since we started. There are, for instance, diverse views on what should be taught in a sex-ed classroom. Our group argued that classes should be informative and thorough, students should learn everything they will need in order to make responsible decisions, including judgments and decisions regarding their own and others' sexual orientation and gender identity. More conservative parents might feel that classes should promote abstinence, and that sex education belongs in the home, not in a public school. Those are both valid viewpoints, and the school district would benefit from an honest discussion between those two groups.

But instead we had a group that wanted to shout out that gay people are dirty, perverted, disease-spreading pedophiles, that the subject is too immoral to be discussed in a health class. The underlying assumption was that their religious belief was correct and everybody else was wrong, and it didn't matter what you said, whether you lied or cheated or twisted the words of the curriculum, the only important thing was to win, to stop the curriculum cold.

When the county added gender identity to the nondiscrimination bill, same thing. You can debate whether discrimination on the basis of this or that should be prevented, including gender identity, it's a fair topic to discuss. But one Republican leader stood up in the County Council meeting and shouted "Heil Hitler!" and added ‘"Wait until little girls start showing up dead all over the county because of freaks of nature." A law says you can't discriminate against someone on the basis of their gender identity, but thse people wanted you to imagine that the result would be dead little girls. Another letter to the Council said, "Hopefully, it will be one of your daughters who gets raped first!" These statements had nothing at all to do with the bill under consideration, and everything to do with frightening people into supporting prejudice and discrimination. The question is: how far will it go?

That kind of talk is nutty, I think we can all agree about that, these are people who have lost touch with reality in some fundamental sense. But lately we have seen the incredible explosion of the tone of it, whether it is racist sentiment, people carrying guns to speeches by the President, incitement to join militias and secede from the US, the desire to "take our country back," or challenges to the qualifications of Barack Obama to hold the office, and I believe Pelosi was onto something, this has gone beyond extremism. It is beginning to sound dangerous.

It seems to me that some people try to live their lives in ways that are reasonable, seeing themselves in the context of a larger society where the individual's needs are limited by the needs of others, while other people see the world as a place of competition where everyone is striving as hard as they can to attain the most personal power. It is very difficult for the two sides to talk to one another, as evidenced in the current health-care debate where the Democrats are trying to work out a way to provide health care to Americans and the Republicans are trying to beat the Democrats. When you see everything in terms of power, violence may appear to be a rational tool for the establishment and enforcement of domination. I hope, with Nancy Pelosi, that the public discourse will cool down a little bit so Americans can focus on solving their problems, but I am not optimistic.