The Presidential inauguration was great, but the euphoria has faded.
What is bothering me now is the utter hatefulness of some of the Republicans I run into (in person and on the web). They really **hate** Obama and Michelle.
Of course, they really **hated** Bill Clinton, too, before he was even inaugurated. I remember seeing “Impeach Clinton” bumper stickers before his first inauguration, and I recently saw “Impeach Obama” on the Web before this inauguration. What is **wrong** with these people?
They aren’t rich people, either. So why are they Republicans anyway? (Like they would ever in the world get anything out of that except an excuse to hate people.)
Some of them seem pleasant and nice till they get started talking about immigrants, poor people or minorities, and then you hear the utter contempt and hatred in their words and voices. (As if that were not exactly how most really rich people feel about **them**—Don’t they know that? Apparently not.)
At dinner Tuesday night an otherwise delightful young woman began snarling because a television at the other end of the restaurant was showing highlights of the inauguration ceremonies (with the sound turned off, mind you). She was furious that the inauguration was being shown on TV.
She was spitting mad, saying that Obama didn’t care about people and was going to ruin the country. Where do they get this stuff?
A local radio station has been running ironic quotes from people on the street about Obama from before the election. The most ironic was a woman with an Eastern European accent who said that we would all be shot, that she feared for her 13 grandchildren if Obama got elected, because (*get this*) “he doesn’t understand how things are done here” [in the U.S., presumably]. She said that it would be the end of America if Obama was elected.
I know that racism and xenophobia account for a lot of it. (Many more people are racists than will admit it these days.) But that can’t be all. Of course a lot of the right-wing churches feed their congregations a lot of this swill, but still….Why do people so clearly **want** to believe hateful lies?
The young woman I mentioned earlier had also come to a meeting right after the election asking angrily if we were all prepared to be drafted for two years of public service. Unknowingly she was quoting propaganda from a right-wing book written in the 1960s, called None Dare to Call it Treason.
The stuff in that book was not true then, and it is not true now, but the right-wingnuts still quote it. Why don’t they get some new material? I guess because that nonsense still works for them. Or it usually did till November 2008.
Anyway, being in the presence of that virulent hatred always upsets me. I get physical symptoms. Stomach aches. Fatique. Stress. Mostly, though, I just get awfully depressed.
Here’s the weird part: Some of these people consider themselves to be very spiritual.
I meet them in spiritual discussion groups and in classes on energy healing. Yet they not only have zero compassion; they seem to pride themselves on not having compassion for the groups they despise.
How can they hate people who need help? How can they hate someone who wants to help people? How can they so hate the very idea of helping people?
Most of all, how can they imagine themselves to be spiritual people with that kind of attitude?
OK, I’m done now. Was that snarky enough?
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