POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY DOUG SAUNDERS IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
"Fear and
guns."
Yes, indeed.
Few Canadians recognize how intense and widespread fear is
there.
Fear causes Americans to own more than 200,000,000 guns.
Fear causes idiotic things liked gated communities.
Fear causes segregation as great as ever: its just done in a
legal fashion now with sprawling suburbs and abandoned regions.
There are places in the United States I could take readers
to that simply would not believe, places which resemble the third-world, right
down to people living in shanties.
Fear even helped sell things like SUVs. It isn't for nothing
that those vehicles look heavy and sinister. Suburbanites needing to travel
even on the edges of certain regions want to feel protected.
After all, it used to be a saying in much of the United States
that if you are bumped into by a black driver, or if you bump into one, you
should just keep going.
Americans love to blubber about their guns protecting them
from a tyrant government, but that is absurd. No one could withstand America's
military, or its often militarized police, for five minutes.
The guns are about fear of blacks and the unknown in the
vague forms of communists or Muslims.
Paranoia can easily be identified by talking to people on
the streets.
Other fears too get conflated here. Average Americans real
incomes have declined for decades, with only moves to cheaper suburbs and both
sposes working preventing a serious decline in standard of living.
There is an intense fear too of government, especially the
federal government (a fear not always without basis). The average American sees
Washington almost as an occupying power having nothing to do with their
interests.
We used to have tales of surviving POWS and black
helicopters, and those fears have only changed form, not substance.
We have too all the fears generated in a society run along
Social Darwinist principles.
Fear of getting sick with no health insurance in a country
where the single greatest cause of personal bankruptcy remains medical bills.
Fear of losing your job (and with that, remember, for middle
class people, losing your health insurance).
Fear of the growing power and influence of China, and to a
lesser extent, Russia and India. Obama's recent actions speak directly to this.
Fear of losing "old ways," especially in religion
in a scientific age: this fear causes much of the political activity of the
Christian Right.
The fears really get dark and formless too, as the fears
around Israel and the Second Coming and Armageddon - things which sound silly
to many of us, but which are very real for tens of millions of Americans.
I've always believed the excessive fears and paranoia you
feel in the United States stem at least in part from a bad gene pool, the
legacy of the Puritans and Pilgrims, truly nasty, hateful folks for the most
part.
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"But the loud and
intolerant are becoming an endangered species"
Where does the author see that?
The United States simply is a seething cauldron of fears,
hates, and mindless belief in exceptionalism.
I spent close to half my life in the United States in two
widely separated periods, and I do not recognize what this writer is taking
about.
No one even raises a voice against scores of extra-judicial
murders no different than the hateful works of South American military juntas
of the past.
Law after law has been passed without serious opposition,
effectively stripping Americans of their Constitutional rights.
Drones will begin domestic overflights. The TSA runs agents
up and down the nation's highways with the right to stop anyone.
The FBI can legally check out your reading at the library.
Every progressive organization in the United States is
compromised by agents.
The President now claims the right to kill an American
without trial or judge if in his opinion the person works against the interests
of the United States.
This possibly qualifies as the most ignorant column ever
published in The Globe.
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People forget: the United States was literally founded on
hatreds and prejudices.
Everything from hatred of the Pope and hatred for paying
taxes to the wide embrace of slavery.
There has been a good deal of moving the furniture around,
but the floor plan has changed remarkably little.
And greed remains a national value, as does a bizarre sense
of exceptionalism.
http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/28/lessons-from-the-american-revolution/
