Why All The Rage?

These people are not idiots.

by Bruce Schimmel

It's been a summer of much discontent. The angry town hall meetings this summer culminated in Congressman Joe Wilson heckling the president in the middle of his address to Congress last week, and calling him a liar.

That Obama was right and Wilson was wrong about illegal alien access to health insurance has, incredibly, only helped the congressman's fundraising.

But what's most disturbing is how easily this anger could spread. Since Obama's election, the Southern Poverty Law Center reports a rash of domestic terrorism and a revival of armed "patriot" militia.

The conventional wisdom is that this rage is a form of racism. As Maureen Dowd recently wrote, when the backbencher from South Carolina yelled "You lie!" at a president who didn't, the unspoken word was, "You lie, boy."

That racism sprouts from a taproot of hate is incontrovertible. But that still begs the question of what's feeding the rage.

Henry Kissinger once said that those with the least to lose fight the hardest. Many of the outraged are dispossessed and fear they'll lose what little they have. Even more debilitating is dealing with broken beliefs, and denying that sacred principles are moribund. Hiding this demise, especially from oneself, consumes a lot of anger. It takes outrage to prop up a psyche in denial. And it is this denial that is driving the hate.

Now, before you accuse me of proffering some useless psychobabble, consider this: Approaching this rage as a disability might hopefully derail a cultural dynamic that's getting dangerous. It is also the most humane attitude to take for those in pain. Instead of meeting their rage with ours — practicing the dubious morality of hating haters — we should deal with this group dyslogic as if it were a medical epidemic.

This paradigm shift is pragmatic, because compassion is a far more effective engine for change than rage. To recognize genuine suffering — whether economic or ideological — is more productive than dismissing dissidents as a bunch of dumb fucks.

Besides, these people are not idiots. (OK, not necessarily.) What they are is blind — to reason and facts. And like others who suffer from denial, they are tragically most blind to having been betrayed. They hide behind hate, unable to see how all of us have been screwed by unchecked corporate power: in housing, banking, on the job, in the environment and certainly in health care.

Like slaves in a corporate manor, those in denial can't stop loving their master — to do so would mean abandoning a political philosophy that promised riches but has produced poison. So, it is denial that compels them to buttress their beleaguered beliefs with silly jibes about socialism and communism.

Deniers will grasp at any straw men to fuel their rage. Let's not feed it. What Congress shouldn't do to Poor Joe and his fellow travelers is to humiliate them further, increasing their rage by demanding more phony apologies.

Let's move on, because the self-deluded need help of a more therapeutic sort and a more pragmatic kind. That means that the more clear-sighted among us must envision a health-care system that offers compassion for all, and work for humane alternatives in a culture that too often breeds pain for profit.

(bruce@schimmel.com)