On Kooks and Libertarians...

Just in time for my previous post, we have more gun-toting dumbasses showing up to Obama events.

One particular cowboy receives special notice. Partly because he is Black, and partly because he chose to brandish two loaded firearms: a Glock 17 at his hip and an AR-15 strapped to his back. Now, admittedly, when I first saw this on the news, I couldn't hear the accompanying audio and didn't know whether he was just another nut case anti-Obama kook, or a somewhat overzealous Obama supporter attempting to make a point.

Turns out he's a Libertarian. And, oh, how I love me some Libertarians.

In a Youtube video they show him "reasoning" with other event attendees. In one of his early rants, he's accusing the government of thievery, making brilliant analogies through hypothetical sarcasm such as "Oh, I want education and I'm just going to take it from you", apparently unaware that public education already exists through taxation. Should I presume he has something against education? Or those paved roads he's walking around on? Or those publicly-funded police officers who are present protecting his right to open-carry, which was granted him by government officials who are also paid with tax money? Or the military industrial complex which provided the R&D that lead to the design of his beloved guns? Or the government-ran regulating bodies that ensured that the garments he's wearing were safe for consumption and presented him no eminent danger of bursting into flames, or that his motorcycle was safe for transportation, or that the money he used to pay for either held any value? He ends this particular tirade with "Taxation is theft...all taxation".

Now, while we're discussing theft, perhaps he's unaware that the capitalistic system that he depends on to earn the money he used to purchase those firearms is based upon theft in the form of profiting off of other's labor. Or that the very land he standing on was stolen, or that it's highly likely that the fact he's even standing there is due to the theft of his ancestors. I'll assume he's oblivious to the fact that he'd probably find it quite difficult to gather enough resources to pay for those weapons or that spiffy shirt and tie if, instead of living in a cooperative society of 312+ million people, he was a loner scrapping out an existence in the wilderness all by himself. Perhaps he would barter off some livestock or other fruits of his labor to the local gunsmith in return for a sleek semi-automatic military-style assault rifle, but, OOPS!, if it wasn't for a division of labor and the manual drudgery of other people in society, there would be no food surpluses to enable the idle time utilized to developing and manufacturing such material possessions.

He then parrots the insane and willfully deluded thought process that the world would be a safer place if everyone carried firearms. I'm sure he doesn't really mean "everybody"; that he has definite restrictions in mind. Now, I won't bother to attempt a debate about firearms, pro or con, but if anyone seriously thinks you can take a crowd full of people who honestly believe public option health care is socialism, government death panels will euthanize grandma, and Obama is comparable to Hitler, mix in some guns, and the end result will be an increase in safety...well, they have quite frankly lost their fucking mind.

He also thinks it would be "insane" NOT to constantly be armed, citing the "dangerous world" we live in as rationalization. Here's where I could—and probably should—cite a multitude of sources showing how ridiculous the "dangerous world" fairy tale is in our particular society, with a dash of stats showing that the one thing that actually is dangerous about our society versus comparable others is the prevalence of, what else, guns. But again, I won't. I'll just ask him when was the last time he had to fend off roves of raping and pillaging lunatic thugs.

At one point (3:13 into this video) he utters a rational thought and illuminates that merely having melanized skin tends to make people nervous. Although his tense ("at one time" and "made") is way off, I'm sure there's a reason he chose to dress in the manner he did. I'm somehow sure that, deep down, he realizes that people like our government officials—who are paid by taxes—and fellow tax-paying citizens—whom he doesn't feel any allegiance to in the form of assistance—made it possible for him to even be considered a full five-fifths human guaranteed the rights by our Constitution that he is speaking so in favor of. All while he hints at the better times of wise men when that Constitution was written: times when he would have most definitely had a very, very different perspective on things.

Welcome to Bizarro World...

Quick hypothetical situation:

It's 2007. A Muslim (or Black or Latino man) comes to an event at which President Bush is speaking and stands along the route the President is expected to travel. He holds a sign which endorses violence against political leaders. On his thigh is a holstered firearm. What happens?

If you think for one second that the end result mimics what happened to William Kostric, the white man who did this Tuesday, you're simply delusional.

Now the reality. 2008: Mr. Kostric attended a New Hampshire event at which President Obama was speaking, openly displaying his loaded firearm whilst holding a sign that read "It's time to water the Tree of Liberty" (a reference to the Jefferson quote "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants"...and I sincerely doubt Mr. Kostric considers President Obama the patriot in this equation).

Was he arrested, charged, prosecuted, imprisoned? None of the above. From footage and reports it's unclear whether or not he was even questioned or observed/followed.

He states that a firearm is a defensive tool (an odd belief in a country with nearly 10,000 homicides by firearm per year). He states that he feels the event would have been safer if everybody attending had a gun. This poppycock is too irrational to event attempt rebuttal.

Now, just in case one think me a tad hyperbolic, peaceful anti-Bush protesters were arrested in Tampa Bay, NYC, Crawford,TX, Charleston, WV, and Kennebunkport, ME (just from a quick Google search). Protestors were also arrested at the 2008 RNC.

And just in case I'm accused of playing the dreaded race card, I'll provide a reminder that although the avowed white supremacists who were captured with rifles in a plot to assassinate then Senator Obama at the 2008 DNC were arrested, no charges were brought against them. Although the very same prosecutor charged an inmate—who just happened to be black—who had mailed a threatening letter containing baby powder to John McCain, stating "we won't stand for threats of this kind in Colorado". Because we all know how much more threatening a black man who is locked down at a penitentiary is than a car full of Neo-Nazi tweakers with rifles roaming about free in public.

There are rather blatant double standards at play here. It sorta reminds me how a Black Harvard professor can be (falsely) arrested for "disturbing the peace" in his own home, while angry white mobs can violently attack a man at a townhall meeting in Florida with no fear of recourse from law enforcement officials. But it's probably just me and my crazy biases overreacting again.

The Racial Undercurrent in the Health Care Reform Brouhaha...

It's so painfully obvious. Birthers. Teabaggers. The sudden flip in the Republican Party's key talking points, from same-sex marriage and abortion to Affirmative Action and gun control (a not so subliminal play to age-old race panic about black crime perpetrated against white chastity). Swelling membership of white-supremacist ranks, cries of "reverse-discrimination and Obama's alleged racism and comparisons to Hitler. They try to play it off as if it's not racism. Nowhere remotely near racism—after all, how can we be racist if we have a Black President? Indeed, they try to convince us that it's Socialism they're against (though the American tradition of anti-Socialism is itself spurned on by xenophobia). Never mind those signs comparing Obama to a monkey, or outright calling him "nigger". Forget that Beck is claiming Obama's attempt at reform is all about reparations. Nope, nothing at all to do with race here, move along, please.

I voice it to my immediate associates every time I see it dripping from the foaming mouths of the protesters in their worked up panics. But I don't see it addressed. Well, at least not with any degree of mainstream exposure, which I'm admittedly not too shocked over. Thus I was quite pleased to see NPR cover it recently.

Professor Harris-Lacewell hits the nail squarely on the head. "I want my America back" is coded language with racist undertones. Which America is it, exactly, that they want back? One with legislated segregation? One with rampant, overt institutionalized racism and sexism? What precisely do we need to repeal to get back to these beautiful glory days? Welfare? Social Security? Medicare? A national highway system? Child labor laws? Unions? Women's suffrage? Manumission? Whose America is it we so desperately need to return to? Exactly which freedoms have been so rampantly eroded, other than the freedom to openly discriminate and oppress entire chunks of the population with no regard to repercussion? The attrition of disparate privilege is not a loss of rights. Equality for all is not implicit with oppression of others.

"Individual responsibility" is classic political white supremacist lingo that is almost exclusively applied to those very same individuals they refuse to actually view as individuals, instead of representative embodiments of an entire population group and supposed "cultural pathology". When is this phrase injected into public discourse other than conversations on welfare, criminal punishment, or any other social issue which is immediately identified with black people in the eyes of the majority?

Who are they talking about when they say "real Americans"? Natives?

Race is most definitely an underlying factor, and anyone who thinks the protest against reform would be equally as rowdy if proposed by a white President is simply disingenuous.

But enough with vain attempts at reason or logic. At times we can just apply simple measures and see what conclusions can be drawn. So, I propose a quick test: Simply ask yourself, how many minorities are so up in arms about Health Care reform? I pretty much see only white faces protesting. Not too many black or brown faces in the affray (unless they're having their Rosa Parks posters ripped out of their hands). Isn't that odd? Yes, quite peculiar indeed.


Update: Tim Wise elucidates the issue in his article Racism, Right-Wing Rage and the Politics of White Nostalgia, which he penned after his CNN appearance discussing this matter:

Throwing the Baby Out With the Bathwater...

Most of us on Facebook have probably seen the little poll about Universal Healthcare, which asks "Are you in favor of a Government run healthcare system?"

Aside from finding it blatantly misleading (using an image of Obama, who doesn't promote anything near a universal healthcare system), I rather enjoy this poll. Not solely because I'm a HUGE advocate of such a plan, but because it gives me a glimpse into other people's perspectives, and I'm a student of human behavior.

Case in point, someone on my friends list voted "No" and left the following comment:

"I don't think my tax $ should pay for someones 'choice' to kill a baby!!"

Now, I obviously respect her (one of the kindest people I've ever met), or she wouldn't be on my friends list...but I'm going to use this as a case point to make a couple of observations.

She has every right to be concerned about what her tax money pays for. I don't want my tax dollars paying for religious schools, supporting faith-based initiatives and the batshit insane bigots that run them, buying bombs to kill brown people for oil in a religious crusade, paying the salaries of racist officials, creating an oppressively brutal police force, or any other myriad elements of our reality. But I'm only one 320 millionth—0.000000003125%— of the population, and I realize how democracy works (or is supposed to).

But the main problem here seems to be the typical over-zealousness and narrow-mindedness mixed with ignorance of the facts in the face of intentional misrepresentation. And I honestly mean nothing negative in that statement.

First, some of the facts as reported here:

"Abortion is not mentioned in the 1,018-page bill..."

"The Supreme Court has established a woman's right to abortion, but federal law prohibits government funds from being used to pay for the procedure in most cases. However, nearly 90 percent of employer-based private insurance plans routinely cover abortion."

OK. Pretty cut and dry.

Second, let's forget almost the entirety of my personal belief system, and attempt to deal with this just on the basis of these and a few other established facts (namely 1: there are a shit-ton of uninsured Americans, and 2: some pretty serious problems come along with being uninsured or not sufficiently insured in a society that has ridiculous healthcare costs).

So, she's saying that 46 MILLION uninsured Americans essentially should continue to suffer because the government MIGHT use tax dollars to fund abortions, most likely only in the event that it saves the mother's life (again, not even a definite option, but, if it is an option, a rarely used one)?

But in the meanwhile, the current private system covers almost all abortions, AND screws over 46 million American men, women (and their fetuses), and children. Not to mention, the dollars YOU pay into YOUR premiums are what the insurance companies use to pay for those abortions (!). So, in the current, private system you already ARE paying for abortions. For less debatable reasons. And there are still 46 MILLION people going without any health care or all, or substandard health care.

So, in a nutshell, the reasoning is "I don't want to help my fellow humans because it might lead to significantly lower levels of something that is already happening". I must say that doesn't make much sense at all.

It is worsened by the fact that the assumed reasoning is based on a religious affiliation with a faith that is supposedly defined by merciful dedication, sacrifice, and non-judgmental service to one's fellow humans according to the example set by a God/prophet that never once mentioned abortion but did prop up the poor, condemn the rich, and stress egalitarianism and beneficence.