We guess we’re cursed with 20-20 hindsight.

That’s why we don’t automatically sign on to Congressman Steve Cohen’s rant about the Tea Party.

Put simply, we subscribe today just as much as we did in the Sixties to the words of President John Kennedy: “The people who create power make an indispensable contribution to the nation’s greatness.  But the people who question power make a contribution just as indispensable.”

We remember our rhetoric in the late 1960s about blowing up government and starting over.  (Perhaps if we’d been successful, the Tea Party folks would be happier about now.)    We read Eldridge Cleaver and Angela Davis, we protested the persecution of the Chicago Eight, we branded Kent State state-authorized murder, we picketed ROTC programs and we were convinced that government was conspiratorial, corrupt and controlled by people with money and power and with little regard for regular Americans.

Nuclear Reactions

In its way, the Sixties’ turbulence fed the paranoia of President Richard Nixon and led to his downfall, which also ended up eliminating traditional moderate Republican politics as the Grand Old Party turned to a right wing base to rebuild itself.  That strategy was repeated as it returned to the well of arch conservatism each time it faced challenges to its power, and the high-risk strategy continues today.

But if history, not to mention personal experience, teaches us anything, it is that extremism has a short half-life in American politics and the political party that embraces it is playing with fire, whether it’s the Democratic Party of the Sixties or today’s Republican Party.  Because of that, if we were giving Democrats advice, we’d tell them to let the Tea Partiers’ rhetoric glow white hot on the cool medium of television.  We remember how former Alabama governor and segregationist George Wallace had similar levels of support in his day as the Tea Party does today, but because he could not shift from populist diatribes to serious answers and policies, he in time flamed out.

But at a more basic level, what the city and the country need are more people willing to take to the streets to have their voices heard, and the fact that we disagree – often vehemently and about almost everything – with the Tea Partiers does nothing to dampen our opinion that protesting is as American as baseball, and if the protests are also on steroids, the public will sort it out in time.

In the end, the public’s good sense wins out, and the pendulum swings back to somewhere in the middle. It may take awhile, but screeds, irrationality and hateful name-calling kill off protesters’ chances to be heard and to have traction with the mainstream, regardless of the political direction from when they come. Whether it’s the anti-tax Tea Party-goers, the birthers, or the town meeting health care hecklers on the right or the over-the-top sloganeering, Move On’s sensationalism about almost everything and the social media self-organizing of the left, it’s just too little these days about creating consensus on important public issues and too much about shouting each other down.

Fear for the Future

We live in the world of Republican and Democratic talking heads who say one thing this year and another next year, depending on whether they are in power.  With little media fact checking, we are left searching for meaning in a swirl of hyperbole, talking points, situational politics and rhetorical blasts that stoke the respective party bases but burn up the chance for honest discussion.

We understand that much of the anger unleashed in the name of health care runs much deeper than that issue for many people. Everything they thought was certain about their world feels upside down right now. A black man is president, gays are getting married, a wise Latina woman is on the Supreme Court, health care will change, white men are becoming the new minority and Latinos will transform the country. They are left with little to do except to stand and scream as the tide overtakes them.

In a country where disillusionment is the coin of the political realm, it’s also a highly combustible currency, and most of all, we run the risk of simply shouting down reasoned debate about serious issues that are crucial for our future. The right has no exclusive claim to this behavior or over-the-top language, and there are some on the left who are caustically frustrated that President Obama is not moving quickly enough and is continuing some of the policies of the Bush Administration they abhor.

Absurdist plots about a secret socialist conspiracies and the “takeover” of health care mantra by the far right and continuing suggestions by the far left that President Bush is a war criminal  do nothing so much as to divert us from the pressing tasks at hand. We seem so easily diverted by panem et circenses that are offered up reliably with one purpose in mind: to take our eyes off the ball.

All in How You Look at It

It is all about winning…and at all costs.  So, it’s no wonder that in a system where compromise is the grease that makes the machinery of government work, things have ground to a halt.

As for us, we wondered for the eight years of the Bush presidency why Americans weren’t out in the streets as tax policies concentrated wealth to the upper 5% in income, as median household income declined precipitously, as poverty climbed 50% and the number of Americans with health insurance declined every year.  The two terms of the Bush Administration were the only two in recent history that income declined through eight years.

So now, tea party-goers are incensed by the notion that health care reform could cost just under $1 trillion over 10 years, but we don’t remember similar outrage when the wealthiest among us got a tax cut even higher, and when the Bush Administration added that same amount to the deficit (without any counterbalancing cuts) with its prescription plan for the government-run health care program that is Medicare. President Bush did then veto the plan to expand health care to cover children, which contributed to the 21% increase in the uninsured during his terms.

In other words, we have a definite point of view, but we believe most Americans are like us: They’re willing to talk to anybody willing to find the common ground where all of us can gather to discuss the underlying challenges before us as a people. One thing seems widely held: It’s a tough time to be an average American. As our paychecks shrink, the political bloviation expands and the people who put the world economy on a ledge are back to earning billions.

Cancerous Hate

Our favorite protester, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said: “All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” What’s lost most in the present climate of fear and loathing is not just civility, but a sense of mutuality that should bind us altogether in search of answers.

Some of us here are old enough to remember the unbridled hatred for President Kennedy and Dr. King and the tragic results. As Dr. King often said, there is room for debate and there is room for disagreement. There just is no room for hatred and objectifying the other side.

He said: “Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.”

Maybe there is indeed a way to get to the Promised Land where we renounce the pandering and the hate-mongers, where we agree that every one should have a voice and where we find ways that we can get back to the barn-raising values that have defined this country for so long.

But first we have to declare hate and hate speech out of bounds, whatever its origins.