Extremely Lame

Our system is a deliberative democracy. And that deliberative democracy depends on a certain kind of talk, a certain conversation in order to function well. What right-wing rhetoric does, when it reaches that violent pitch, is it undermines that particular conversation, such that the focus of political debate, becomes increasingly hamstrung by fear, and the ability of citizens to engage in the basic act of civics becomes gummed up. That conversation breaks down. -Jeffrey Feldman

What happens when you tune out rational thought and listen only to opinions that attempt to remove all humanity from those with whom you disagree? Well, eventually someone actually takes you seriously and does something about it.

On a hot July morning in Knoxville, Tennessee, a man walked into a Universalist Unitarian church with a shotgun and started unloading on people. Why? Because he perceived them to be beneath contempt. He considered them to be liberals.

Yeah, I’m serious. Read about it in the first part of the transcript of Bill Moyers’s show from earlier this month.

After he was apprehended, he started liberally foaming at the mouth spewing forth the kinds of bile you typically only hear on AM radio or on the History Channel or in Wahabi cassette tapes. Not even Fox News has the stomach for most of this. He was raving about things like how the liberals are ruining America and how churches like the Unitarians are part of it because of their acceptance of homosexuals and transgendered people.

It’s not like we can’t figure out where this clearly deranged man found these ideas. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least a half dozen radio personalities who’ve engaged in things like this and just escalate and escalate the shock value because what was shocking last week just isn’t so shocking this week. It’s like having a drug addiction. The body and mind gets used to a level of fear or oxycodone such that you need to keep upping the dosage to elicit the same reaction.

Where do they get these tactics? Chris Buice, the pastor of the Knoxville church that was attacked, has seen it all before.

If you look at the history of like situations like in Rwanda in 1994, the talk radio was a big part of leading to the conditions that created a genocide. The Hutu radio disc jockeys would call the Tutsi cockroaches. There’s the sense that these aren’t human beings. You know, they’re not human beings with children or grandchildren. These are cockroaches. And when you hear in talk radio that liberals are evil, that they are traitors, that they are godless, that they are on the side of the terrorist. That’s hate language. You don’t negotiate with evil people. You don’t live in community with people you consider to be traitors.

That’s all fine and good. But why? What’s the purpose of completely dehumanizing those people who disagree with you. It certainly isn’t just to win elections. Again, Reverend Chris Buice:

When you blame all your problems on some minority group then everyone else is exonerated. We exonerate ourselves. We don’t have to look at ourselves to see what sort of ways we contribute to the problems of the world. We don’t have to examine ourselves, to see what we are doing that is helping to create the problems that we’re so concerned about.

All of this having been said, I really really hope that things like this shooting don’t continue to happen. If it does, it’s going to be more and more difficult to hold back the scared and frightened people calling for the curbing of someone else’s First Amendment rights. We’ve already given in to fear and had a huge number of our rights seized in the interest of security thanks in large part to the USAPATRIOT Act and things like warrantless wiretapping. We don’t need to let another set of people who incite terror and fear for the purpose of effecting political change to be the latest cause of our infringing of our rights.