Sounds more like religious tyranny to me.
So when did forcing your religious beliefs on your employees, or on society as a whole through legislation, become the definition of "religious liberty"?
Sounds more like religious tyranny to me.
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The difference between a Republican and a centrist Third Way corporatist Democrat.
Republican: Corporations can rape you with no consequences. Third Way Democrat: Corporations can still rape you, but we'll beg them to leave a dollar on the dresser when they leave. Don't know why, but the other day I was thinking about the Dixie Chicks.
Okay I think I do know why. It was this Russia, Ukraine and Crimea thing. A potentially volatile area of the world, with a long history of instability amongst its various nationalities and ethnic groups, threatens to explode, and it was like the world, and especially America's media, went into a time warp. There was of course the instant reflex to fall back into the old Cold War postures and attitudes. Anything happening anywhere has to be filtered through the lens of the old Soviet vs USA contest. It always has to be about us. Couldn't be about Crimea having been part of Russia for a couple of hundred years, and then being handed over to Ukraine during the days of the old USSR, and now Putin exploiting these tensions and the unrest in the Ukraine to attempt to re-establish the glory of the Russian Empire, and perhaps a little buffer between him and NATO. [Catches breath]. No rather it had to be about how Russia and Putin view the U.S. and the American president. Whatever. But the other knee jerk response was to bring back the usual suspects from the Bush administration. Everyone who has been wrong about every major foreign policy event or issue for the last 20 years was back in full force on all the network and cable news shows and op-ed pages. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bolton and Rice were there weighing in. And for good measure McCain, Graham, and Giuliani. Suddenly we were all marching to Baghdad again with the same carload of clowns trying to lead the way. And the first question I had to ask was "why?" Why does anyone care what any of these people think about anything going on in the world anywhere? As stated above they have gotten just about everything wrong for so long, it's hard to remember the last time any of the people above got anything right. But there they were dominating the Sunday talk shows and the news shows. They were partying like it was 2003. I couldn't help but think that nobody should be listening to them. At the least none of them should be allowed on any public forum without first having issued an apology for being so disastrously wrong about everything, especially Iraq. These people owe us apologies, they owe the people they sent over there apologies. They certainly are not owed a venue to keep spouting their crap. It then struck me that they owe The Dixie Chicks an apology. You remember them? They were a highly successful country music trio from Texas. They had sold millions of records and filled stadiums. They were hot. And despite being country musicians from Texas, they were on the liberal side of the political spectrum, though that was not widely known. And in the buildup and rush to war in Iraq under false pretenses, they found themselves playing a concert in England, our primary partner in crime in Iraq. The people in England were more against the war than was the population of the United States at the time, even though the U.S. was quite divided as well. Relatives traveling in England around that same time told me of the graffiti one could see around London, primarily saying "F^&* Bush!" So it was in that atmosphere that the Dixie Chicks at their concert asked the crowd not to judge all Americans by Bush and his administration and supporters. Natalie Maines, the lead singer, even announced they were ashamed that Bush, like them, was from Texas. The exact quote is: "Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas." Pretty mild stuff compared to what is said routinely now about a Democratic president by many on the right. But once tape of the concert and the comment began circulating a shit storm erupted. ClearChannel, which owns thousands of radio stations, including many country stations, yanked all Dixie Chicks records off the air. Maines tried apologizing and clarifying that she should have been more respectful, but the damage had been done. There were events around the country where Dixie Chicks records and CD's were burned or bulldozed or buried while crowds stood and cheered. How dare they criticize their hero American president as he prepared to lead us to war? [In fact the war erupted about a week after Maines made her comment]. For his part Bush had this to say: “The Dixie Chicks are free to speak their mind. They can say what they want to say.… they shouldn’t have their feelings hurt just because some people don’t want to buy their records when they speak out.… Freedom is a two-way street ….” Funny how the right didn't think Freedom was a two-way street when the patriarch of Duck Dynasty spoke his mind about gays, blacks and the best wives are the ones you get when they're 15. But I digress. The Dixie Chicks have continued on with some breaks since then. They won awards. They made more records. They played concerts, albeit at smaller venues. But their career as a band would never recover to the same heights pre-Bush comment. And as it turns out they were the ones who were right. So all those wrong-headed jerks filling our screens and babbling on about Russia and the Crimea should just shut up and go away. But before they do they should apologize to people in the following order: 1. All the people killed in Iraq, all the service members killed or maimed; 2. All the families of the service members who were killed or maimed or called back to countless tours of duty while their families struggled to make ends meet; 3. The Dixie Chicks; 4. The rest of us. Then please just slink off back under a rock and STFU. And finally one last random thought about the Dixie Chicks: I wonder how many people who gleefully or eagerly threw their Dixie Chicks CD's in the piles or into the pits would later show up at Tea Party rallies with signs showing Obama morphed into Hitler? And it would never occur to them they had too much irony in their diets. There have been a number of articles and postings recently concerning the toxic impact of Fox News, especially to members of the older generation. One article on salon.com dealt with a documentary made concerning "losing" someone's father to Fox News. This article in turn generated postings such as this one on the progressive blog Daily Kos detailing the experiences of others who have seen family members fall under the sway of the hate, disinformation, illogical rants, and hysterical conspiracy theories of Fox News and other right wing outlets.
As accurate as these articles have been I believe the impact of right wing media is only part of the story. Another factor is how susceptible some people of a certain generation are to having their fears and anxieties preyed upon and played upon by these media opportunists. The world they see around them now is far different in many ways than the one they grew up in, the one they expected to inhabit as they raised families and reached retirement. As examples I can think of a number of incidents from my own life. First let's level set. I am a baby boomer. Too young to have come of age in the raucous 1960's, but the times of the late 60's and early 1970's certainly shaped my world and my expectations. Let's just say I am within ten years of what traditionally had been considered retirement age. So I'm younger than many of the parents and grandparents who have been the subject of these "lost to Fox News" pieces. But even for people of my age group the country is vastly different than the one we internalized in our youth. Is it any wonder then that some people of my age could be seen crying and raging at Tea Party events in recent years that they "wanted their country back"? The first example of how the world has changed since my youth occurred in high school, specifically American History class my junior year of high school. The teacher said he had a question for just the guys in the class. What if we boarded an airplane and when the pilot's voice came on over the intercom to tell us about our flight, time of departure, etc that it was a female's voice? What would be our reaction? Maybe my class was a fairly progressive, forward thinking one even though political discussions of any kind were rare among classmates at that time. Every boy who spoke up, including me, thought the question was ridiculous on its face. No commercial airline would put anyone in that position unless they had gone through proper training and were properly certified, it would be too risky for the airline to do otherwise. So you would have to assume this was a qualified pilot, female or not. "That's interesting", our teacher smiled. "The guys in the class before you were almost unanimous in saying they would get up and leave the plane." Remembering back to high school days it is possible that some alpha male in the other class spoke up first with that opinion and everyone else followed. But even so the point is that it really wasn't that long ago that the question of a female pilot was something curious enough to be considered worthy of serious thought and debate. Fast forward to recent years for another example of how today's world has diverged so much from that of my youth. I work at a large corporation in the Information Technology department. At one point, a few years ago, I was part of a small team that worked very closely together for a few months on a very fast-paced intense project. The project methodology called for daily team meetings. One day as we sat huddled in a small conference room it struck me that this would not have been the project team I would have visualized being a member of in my youth. I looked around the table and saw a man born in Pakistan, another originally from Indonesia, a young woman from South Korea and a young man from India, and me, a middle-aged white male born in the USA. Except for the Indian all of these people were employees living in the area where the office is located. This was definitely not my father's work place. People react to change in different ways. I noted the makeup of the team and just thought "wow how different from years ago".But I did not find it threatening or unsettling. Rather it struck me as kind of "cool" and an indication that times certainly have changed. But not everyone would look at it that way. What I have described were easily visible ways the country has changed during my lifetime. But there have been deeper currents as well that have led to changes perhaps less visible, but truly disruptive. The middle class in America has been rocked and squeezed for many decades now. Free trade and globalization have moved high-paying jobs overseas, jobs that used to sustain a large part of the American middle class. Changes to tax and fiscal policy have funneled more and more money into fewer and fewer hands, weakening demand in the economy and putting a downward pressure on job growth. At the same time government policy and globalization pressures have lessened the influence of unions and simultaneously made it easier for companies to exploit workers and to get more work out of them for less money. The result is a generation of people who either remember how their own families were provided for, or can remember providing for their own families in a much less stressful environment. Wages and salaries have stagnated while worker productivity has doubled. Job security is a thing of the past. Even if you're doing a good job and your company is profitable, you are not immune from being laid off. Guaranteed pensions were replaced by defined contribution plans and then by 401(k)'s. Each move leading to more risk and less security for the middle class would be retiree. In that atmosphere is it any wonder that people of the baby boomer generation and later are fearful and anxious? It is very easy for some people to conflate the two sea changes that have occurred for this generation, the unsettling and jarring shocks of our changing economy and workplace, with the more transparent and visible changes to the American melting pot. It is an environment where certain people fall easy prey to those who will offer them easily identifiable scapegoats and simplistic answers. People recognize that things have changed in this country as it relates to their own personal economic well-being, and not in a good way. In that respect I am in agreement with the Tea Party baby boomers wanting their country back. The difference is recognizing the forces that have 'taken it away'. It's so much easier to blame all the problems, and your feelings of anxiety and fear, on people different than you, even if logic tells you they have no real power, than it is to look at the policy and structural changes that have occurred and work with others to try and move the country in a different direction. Who is it easier to take on, rich Wall Street stockbrokers and bankers, or immigrants, single mothers, poor people and people with strange accents and a different skin color? So yes Fox News and their ilk are all too ready to stoke the forces of fear and prejudice for their own aims. But it is also important to recognize the things that are leading to anxiety and fear of people of a certain age that makes them easy prey, if we have any chance of reaching and regaining those we have lost. |