Shouting Down Reason

It was only a matter of time until violence erupted as it did recently when the referenda-by-shouting crowd attempted to overrun a health-care town-hall meeting in Florida. Prevented from entering they blamed security measures for the confrontations that ensued. At other locations belligerents distort the basic freedoms of speech and peaceful assembly with staccato shouts of "lies" and "liar" even before meetings can be effectively convened. And a thinly-veiled racial undercurrent animates the agenda of these throngs as it does much of what passes for acceptable discourse by those who inflame the less stable members of an unfailingly unenlightened electorate.

Instead of speaking to actual issues, waves of unruly crowds swarm scheduled events for the express purpose of preventing civilized, informative discourse from occurring. The most peculiar feature of this obstructionist conduct is that participants seem to lack any real understanding of what health-care reform would involve. "It's not my America anymore", one tearful attendee exclaimed. Oddly, many of the protesters are elderly, no doubt already receiving Social Security and Medicare benefits. By some contorted mental process, encouraged by unprincipled pundits and organizers, these folks seem not to grasp that the programs in which they are enrolled are in fact government-run.

And in what has become standard operating procedure among right wingers, crude methods are passed off as acceptable expressions of dissent. Tim Phillips, one of the primary organizers of the boisterous hordes that have fanned out across the nation, appeared on Thursday's Rachel Maddow Show, and tried to make the case that liberals promote their causes similarly. However, most observers of the recent disturbances say they have never seen anything quite like the operations orchestrated by Phillips and celebrated by the ravings of people like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh.

The best response to the riotous conduct of these groups is to air films of the racial slurs and outrageous accusations that prevail wherever they congregate. They evoke so many unpleasant images - - like the people pounding on the windows of a Miami-Dade County office where a recount was under way in the 2000 presidential election, not locals but Republican operatives from national headquarters and the offices of politicians like Tom DeLay and Fred Thompson - - like the groups who gathered in front of Vice President Gore's official residence to chant "get out of Cheney's house" - - like the purported public outcry about a balanced budget now, probably the least understood piece of the broad financial picture but a key Republican talking point.

The rumblings about health care have unleashed pent-up racial tensions lurking just below the surface. And Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court further exacerbated feelings of unease among people who fear the dissolution of 'real' America. Distrust of 'the other' looms very large these days, just when it seemed the country had turned a corner, and partisans criticize the president for not curing the economy in the first six months of his administration and create just enough doubt about his country of origin to make that seem a legitimate concern rather than an inability to accept the color of his skin. They say they stand on principle about free markets and capitalism instead of admitting to a deeply ingrained sense of privilege and entitlement and they play a dangerous game of inciting discontents of every description.

Max Pappas of Freedom Works, a major organizer of the demonstrations, played innocent on Friday's Washington Journal saying the people his organization empowers just want to be heard about the "encroachment" of government into their lives. The problem, however, is that shouting down speakers isn't about getting heard it's about not letting anyone else get heard. His big health-reform ideas include growing health-savings accounts and allowing the purchase of insurance across state lines. He's right, there are a lot of angry people 'out here' but they aren't always sure what to be angry about.

The most distressing aspect of the current disruptive demonstrations is the hatred they engender. The picture of a grinning white man standing next to a politician hung in effigy, placards labeling the president a racist and a Nazi, jokes about Senator Dodd's cancer challenge our ideals and recall a time when lynching was popular sport in the south, crowds assembled to watch the spectacle, broad smiles on many faces. The kind of dissent we are witnessing dishonors the memory of those who perished at the hands of hate-mongers and impugns the core principles of our national belief system.