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Chapter 4 -- page 56
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One of the most horrific and misguided thoughts of the
time that got embedded in the American psyche was that compassion was equal to
socialism or communism.
By 2009, just the comment of a compassionate
governmental policy made the speaker into, at a minimum a socialist, and in the
worse case, a Hitleresque demagogue who was striving to undermine the entirety
of the USA. That may sound melodramatic,
but phrases like that were actually used at the time by American citizens. I can still remember with disgust back in
2010 when President Obama was trying to implement some type of universal health
insurance program so that every American citizen would have access to health
care. The shocking thing to me is that a
system, which cared about the general health of all citizens, was considered
akin to Nazism by some people. Even to
this day that still strikes me as the most absurd type of rhetoric. To me and many others, it was an unconscionable
misuse of our American right to freedom of speech, and I argued at the time
that it should be considered hate speech.
To utilize NAZI imagery in an American political debate is simply
immoral on any level.
The Republican Party and the Tea Party Movement were
mostly to blame for this rhetoric, and as early as 1980, there had come a point
where political expediency was the paramount goal. Rhetoric could be founded upon any truth or
mistruth and could even be what many folks would consider slanderous. The shocking thing about this situation is
that so many American citizens actually accepted this rhetoric and supported
it. I can understand that there was
disillusion in the US at the time due to the 2008 economic collapse but to sink
to such lows should have been offensive to so many more people. This is why I argued so strongly that a new definition
of freedom needed to be established, as we as a nation, had sunk just too far in
our willingness to allow anyone to do or say whatever they chose in the
political arena.
