I want my country back. We are hearing this a lot during the media parade of “mob action” at Health Care Town Hall meetings. Apparently people are beginning to discover that a lot more is going on at Health Care Town Halls than discussions about medical insurance.
Is it racism of disgruntled whites grumbling about some black guy running the country?
Is it the passing of the GI Joe Generation fearful of losing its place of power to the march of history?
Or is it that people tired of the lies and a professional political class that is in the pocket of interests beyond their control?
I am having this conversation with some friends and am posting their comments. You are welcome to join in.
Bill Gram-Reefer is Editor & Publisher of Halfway To Concord, founded in 2004. Halfway To Concord is the leading online source for community-driven political news, events, and opinion for Contra Costa County and the San Francisco East Bay.
{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }
The health debate isn’t just about health or the role of government in the economy (“Health Debate Isn’t About Health,” Capital Journal, Aug. 11). It is about the Constitution, liberty and the future of the republic. As a high-school government teacher for 11 years, I have read the Constitution thoroughly and completely hundreds of times. The Constitution is about limiting government—keeping it as small and unobtrusive as possible. It is about the government protecting property, not taking away from one group to give to another.
As our government gets further away from those basic principles, we move toward the tyranny that the Founding Fathers hoped to avoid. The health bill may be well-intentioned, but it gives government sweeping powers to make health-care decisions concerning everything from preventing life (abortion) to ending it (end-of-life counseling). It may not intend to put the government between the physician and the patient but it gives the government unprecedented power to do just that.
There is no authority in the Constitution for government to take over our health care, just as there was no authority in the Constitution to take over General Motors or take taxpayer money to bail out failing banks. The government decided to throw the Constitution under the bus during the last year of the Bush administration, and the current administration has driven the bus back and forth over the document. The people of this country have a right to be angry and fearful for both our liberty and the future of our republic.
David Williams
Fairfax, Va.
I am sad to say that I do think there is a racist/xenophobic element to the “I want my country back” movement. Our president is of mixed race, born to an immigrant, in a state that is populated by “foreigners” (how Asian-American are often regarded in this country, regardless of their place of birth). And a Latina just became a member of the Supreme Court. As was frequently discussed in the media during her confirmation hearings, the Republicans cannot feasibly regain control of the White House without the support of Hispanics. And the US will be a majority non-white country in relatively short-order.
I believe this has some Americans feeling wistful at best and cornered and angry at worst.
I think that health-care reform is an incredibly complex issue. in 2009 we have the epidemic of obesity and its attendant health issues (diabetes, cardiac problems)–incredibly expensive to manage under any health system. Obesity is entirely preventable but in a free society, of course, we cannot force anyone to maintain a sensible weight. And we have some miraculous medical technologies that are also unbelievably expensive. I’m thrilled for the parents of micro-premie babies that their children can survive, but the cost , I’m sure, would take my breath away. Oh, and then you have the pharmaceutical companies telling us that we need prescriptions for things like toenail fungus and frequent urination. What’s next, a hiccup medicine?
In our soundbyte/Twittified culture I think it’s difficult to engage in long-form discussions about these issues, and it doesn’t help when people engage in name-calling and shouting.
On that note, HTC, thanks for hosting a sane discussion.
Hey Texan, our America has up to this time not been in such straights as to cause mommy’s, daddy’s, uncles, aunts, gamma’s and grandpa’s to vest such amounts of time into the saving of this nation. It is just as important at this stage of the great experiment as it was in 1773!
Most of our sacred hero’s of the revolution could not read or write but they died, starved, froze, and even even went broke for this country. To a man/woman, they stepped up and gave what was needed for their posterity, us.
Few had degree’s to wave in others faces proclaiming their intellect!
I for one thank my ancestors and maybe yours!
Most of us had nothing to lose. It was already lost in 1933.
Katy Abram, the self-described conservative who was caught on camera warning Arlen Spector about the United States “turning into Russia,” gave a very revealing interview with Lawrence O’Donnell last night.
She makes it clear that what has her riled is not any specific aspect of the Democratic proposals for health care reform, as she also admitted to Spector. On the contrary, she’s just generally angry about “programs” — everything from TARP to Cash for Clunkers.
These programs are being funded by me, my husband, our friends, our family. We have a small business and the amount of taxes we pay out on that, its ridiculous and yet they want us to pay more.
One wonders how she’s determined her taxes are “ridiculous” in light of the fact that she also admits she doesn’t know what her income is. Which means, of course, she also doesn’t know if any of the health care proposals actually will affect her personally.
Aside from not wanting to pay taxes, Abram seems to think we should eliminate “programs” that aren’t specifically detailed in the Constitution, though she refused to say whether she’d cut Medicare or Social Security.
I think a lot of the programs are in place were not supposed to be here.
Along those lines, she told Sean Hannity in a seperate interview,
George Washington is rolling over in his grave right now. This is not what the Constitution wrote.
I’m not trying to pick on Mrs. Abram. She’s obviously not very knowledgeable, but that doesn’t mean she’s not earnest, or doesn’t have the right to protest her government and speak her mind.
The problem is, you simply can’t have a meaningful debate about government reform of health care policy with someone who objects to the very idea of government doing pretty much anything. And every person I’ve seen asking questions at these town halls fits into that category.
Again: they’re not about health care reform.
You over think so much with so little of life’s experiences. The elderly have age on their side, they remember when Americans all pulled on the same rope.
I am 64 yrs old and I can say I grew up in a very secure all white culture who treated all people with dignity. We had blacks in our school, we bent over backwards to make sure they were treated as well if not better than anyone else.
Life has been so easy for most of you, you have been deprived of the education pain and struggle can bring. It is those lessens that cause one to steele their belief system. It is these beliefs that carry one through hard times rather than commit suicide. And when the valley’s are again looked down on, it is from a better man’s perspective.
You who are of a younger age will never see better times than America has afforded it’s elderly.
Now, you may attack me from your youthful minds that have been seeded with false information. Without checking for factual data your opinions are not yours at all, but others opinions simply regurgitated.
And so we have herd thinkers en masse. A sadder world is in store for all of. you
“Or is it that people tired of the lies and a professional political class that is in the pocket of interests beyond their control?”
I trust NONE of the politicians. It has nothing to do with party or political persuasion. I just think they are all crooked lying phonies.
It will take a lot to get me to vote for an incumbent, like maybe an opponent who wears a tin foil hat and drinks Kool-Aid. Figuring out which politicians are the biggest liars is becoming more difficult every year.
It’s chickens finally coming home to roost. Which country do they want back? The former constitutional republic(s) created by We the People? Or the federalized democracy with subordinate ‘United States citizens’ that gradually supplanted the former and which BTW has achieved most of the ten necessary conditions per the Communist Manifesto? But don’t take my word, read it yourself:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_manifesto#10_Conditions_For_Transition_To_Communism
Some Americans, as illustrated by Mike Todor’s story about his mother, didn’t understand they were implicitly contracting away individual sovereignty when they accepted the Ponzi schemes of Social Security, Medicare, etc. But the ‘greatest generation’ was also intellectually dishonest and incredibly selfish to pretend those schemes were sustainable.
Re: MT’s complaint about the (false) liberal/conservative dialectic. It’s not just the media that perpetuate this. You don’t have to go any further than your local CCRP meeting to hear the ‘leadership’ profess their own ‘conservatism’; decry ‘liberals’; and banish ‘libertarians.’
When the contemporary meanings of words such as ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ have been completely REVERSED from their original meanings, then those words no longer have constructive use other than for dissembling and labeling those one wishes to demonize.
Moreover, why isn’t there honest acknowledgement by media insiders (or even CCRP) that the (false) liberal/conservative dichotomy is an incomplete representation of the political spectrum? The second orthogonal axis provided by the Nolan Chart is intentionally ignored. Why? Especially when the second axis provides an equal or greater statistically significant discriminatory basis by which to evaluate policy?
See Nolan Chart:
http://www.nolanchart.com/faq/faq8.php
I believe it is the perceived erosion of a way of life, whether actual or mythical. One protester quoted in today’s paper said, “I stayed quiet when they took away prayer and I stayed quiet when they legalized abortion, but I’m not going to let them take my health care.”
Part of the dynamic is the widespread reporting from a single town hall meeting – that of Arlen Spector where aging conservative Catholics were already activated by the Bush political machine and widely opposed Obama in the primaries. These reports skew the debate toward an aging and declining minority.
Even if these data do make a case for generational change, it is impossible to disentangle aging effects (an effect associated with simply getting older—like weight gain or number of books read) from generational effects with one point of datum. It could just as plausibly be argued that young people don’t have as much property to protect (an investment stake so to speak) as the older folks. Indeed, young people have been more “Democratic” than their elders for I think 8 of the last 10 Presidential elections (I’d have to check that).
All such arguments that use these sort of data have to disentangle age, generation (cohort), and period (special historical circumstances) effects. So in the social science juggling act, even with longitudinal panel data there are three balls and at least one of them is “in the air” (unable to be firmly disentangled from the others) at all times. When political debates in the major media (both print and electronic) actually try to use poll (either opinion or electoral) results as “facts” to support their claims (as opposed to throwing stupid slogans at one another a la Oberman (sp?) and O’Reily) they often over-interpret a single datum.
End geeky lecture—go about your business as before . . .
Is it about loss of “power” or the deeper fear of the ability to maintain a “way of life” for themselves and their family? Or, do you equate the 2 as equal? Best, MT
Yea, thanks Peter, and we need more “deep data dives”. For example, the current sources of our 1.6 Trillion dollar national debt, for example: how much is due to Iraq, bailouts of major banking related institutions, entitlement programs such as Medicare/Medicaid, SS, and retirements, and how much is blown (spent) on the military vs. welfare monies, & imbalance of trade data. And, what the trends and differentials tell us…
As for passing on of “historicistic traditions”. I remember standing in line for the Salk sugar cubes that was served like some Presby communion but underwritten by government largess. My mother, terrified of another polio outbreak (think H1N1) like the one that affected my sister Nina (and nearly killed her) dutifully took us to the fire hall and had nothing but praise for the strong government that was looking out for her and her children’s welfare. Also, she and many others in my blue collar town of Bridgeport, PA were also proud that they had a government that offer Social Security benefits for them and their spouses with the onset of old age and retirement. They saw it as a fair bargain: they would work for modest wages and in return enjoy what was left of their elder years when they were no longer employable. To them, that was good government. I grew up in this milieu and introjected a lot of its wisdom, but nowadays all I’m proffered by the media is a fierce liberal/conservative dichotomy that does not allow for nuance in political dialogue or discussion of the facts…big money and corporatism doesn’t want that… the link I sent about Henry Fairlie implied a Tory approach which was conservative, but saw government protecting the “average citizen”…
You and the angry mob want to get different countries back and from different people.
The angry mob wants a country where Hispanics were poor and lived only in NYC, Miami, San Diego, LA, Texas and the SW border states. Blacks were (at least outwardly) happy and knew their place. Families went to church on Sundays. There were only 3 TV networks and they all aired Bonanza, the Little House on the Prarie, Andy Griffith, Ed Sullivan and daytime baseball games. And, civil rights and economic opportunities were reserved for the white, heterosexual, Christian majority.
I don’t think that that is the country that you want to have back.
A side note on the unemployment figures is the hit taken by traditional middle-class, middle-aged males in their bread-earning prime.
Obama McCain
18-29 66 32
65+ 45 53
While there is certainly a difference between the over 65 and the under 30, is this the kind of evidence that supports a passing of a generation explanation? By the by, aren’t WWII vets in their 80s?
(source—CNN, exit polls—I’ll look at the NES data to see if the picture is different with a survey style sample as opposed to an exit poll).
I maintain that what we are witnessing that most would call “culture war” as below is in fact generational passing of GI Joe generation that was brought up in a rationalistic world view v. a generation that sucked down modernism (irrationalism-activisim-process) for most of its life
Problem is you can’t tell a boomer anything.
So another generation at least needs to die off in the wilderness so we can get this shit out of the syste,
There is another interesting column in today’s Washington Post which suggests that health care may not be the central issue in the Health Care debate. Quotes by Pennsylvania protesters at Arlen Spector’s town hall meeting about “wanting my country back”, ” we lost the country of my childhood” and “restoring the Constitution” seem to support this premise.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/11/AR2009081103164.html?wpisrc=newsletter
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