9/12/09 A Day to Forget

There’s so much hoopla about the 60,000 people attending the 9/12 march. What about the 333,999,721 people who did not? Since when has rule by the loudest become unwritten law?

As I watched some of these seemingly illiterate sign carriers being interviewed I was appalled at the misinformation they were repeating. Those who carried signs protesting Czars didn’t know what a Czar was. They also didn’t know that the Czar phenomena began with Ronald Regan and that George W. Bush took it to new heights.

Each sign carrier protested something different. The only unity among those 60,000 was that they hated. “Disgruntled white taxpayers joined conspiracy theorists, gun enthusiasts, state-sovereignty activists and outright racists on Pennsylvania Avenue.” (1)

“We saw another protester wearing a t-shirt calling himself a "freedom rider." The real freedom riders were civil rights activists who rode buses into the segregated South in the 1960s.” (2) 

Did they care that thousands of their American brethren were losing their health insurance each day?  Apparently not.  I wondered if they truly even thought that one through.  If they didn’t, then it means that they don’t give a damn about other people and whether they live or die.

Think about this:

“If Republicans had gotten everything they wanted for the last seventy-five years or so, the United States of America would have no Social Security, no Medicare, no Aid to Dependent Children, no civil rights, no environmental protections, no privacy rights to make contraception legal. There would be no business taxes, either, which could mean an even more vigorous business sector but also lots of gated communities and private security guards and — who knows? — maybe death squads to put down the inevitable insurrections. And there would certainly be no "death taxes," so we'd be burdened with an ever larger cohort of inbred aristocrats. And our daughters and sisters would be flocking to the nation's emergency rooms, hemorrhaging from illegal abortions. And we might still be at war in Vietnam.” (3)

If these people and their ignorance don’t scare you, then they should.

(1) “AlterNet” “Right Wingers Marching in DC Is Big News -- But the Same Old Faces Are Pulling the Strings” Adele M. Stan Sept. 14, 2009

(2) “Think Progress” “Radical, Racist Signs Featured At 9/12 March” Sept. 12, 2009
(3) “Esquire” “Why the Obama Haters Are Choking on Their Own Sins” John H. Richardson