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A Nation of Haters and Victims
Or a Nation of Thinkers, Hopers, and Doers
By Ruth E. Todd iUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2010 Ruth E. Todd
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-4502-0613-6
Chapter One
The Beginning
The United States is a unique country. It was founded by those who wanted to escape state-sponsored religions and political oppression. It was born of the philosophies of Rousseau, Locke, Paine, and Hume. It also arose from thinking, discourse, and dissent-always with an eye to what could be built and not just what could be torn down. This seemed to work for many years, but recently there has been a blight affecting many in this country. In the last two decades there has seemed to be a rush to judgment. Duke Lacrosse players, a congressman from California, a basketball player-all could be guilty of something, but before investigations are complete and the facts known, haters and victims foment misinformation and hate. Now is the time to take stock of who we are and who we want to be, and to make sure that we are more akin to the thinkers than the haters.
We seem to be at a crossroads. Which way will we go? Will we move toward the future or mire ourselves in conspiracies and distrust? Haters and victims are ready to continue their dark arts, but thinkers, hopers, and doers can still win the war. The whole world is waiting for the answer, as what we do here affects them as well.
Adolf Hitler wrote, "How fortunate for governments that people they administer do not think." It is not just the government that is fortunate; it is also all of the haters and victims who continuously preach the gospel of hatred and victimhood. The United States has been infected by a disease that taints all that we do. Haters and victims have permeated our society and created a national malaise that makes us unable to think clearly.
It is time for us to think for ourselves. Sound bites and filtered information that appeal to our emotions have gone on long enough. We need to do our own research to discover the truth of things. This nation was built by men and women who had vision, forethought, wisdom, and dreams. While we cannot point to every event in our history with pride, as a nation we have made great strides in creating an environment for growth and equality. We are an experiment that succeeded, and while not perfect, it is the envy of many. In the press, you hear about those who preach about taking the country back. If you want to do this, take it back from the haters and victims. Think! Because we stopped thinking for ourselves and allowed others to tell us what to think, our national character has been altered-but it is not too late. If we want to be cured, we must acknowledge the problem. Failure to think and reason caused the extermination of Native Americans, discrimination in employment for immigrants, Jim Crow laws, and black codes (laws that limited the civil rights of African Americans). But we are not so far removed from these events that we cannot learn from our mistakes and move forward.
The United States is undoubtedly the nation most other countries love to hate, but many people around the world ignore this tendency and choose to love us anyway. We have for centuries offered hope to people who have been oppressed and downtrodden. Colonists came here seeking a better life and wanting freedom from the state-sponsored religions of Europe. The United States is a country whose people built a government, economy, and lifestyle that have become the envy of the world. This is all to our credit, but there is a disease affecting us. It is not AIDS; it is not H1N1; it is not cancer. This sickness is uglier than those, and for the nation it is much more damaging. We have allowed haters and victims to alter how we think of our country, ourselves, and our neighbors.
Fearmongering and hatemongering have become full-time jobs for many in this country. Not only are people profiting from this business; they are causing irreparable harm to this nation. I am not speaking of comedians who take the darker things and poke at them so we find humor in our folly, but the haters who keep telling us how bad things are and who is to blame, as well as those who think they are victims.
There are haters and there are victims, and there are those haters who become victims and so-called victims who become haters. This dark circle is somehow convinced that they do not control their own destinies and that other people get special treatment. They assume that what they hear on talk radio is what the truth is. They also assume that things they read on Internet sites are true without verifying who the owner/sponsor of the Web site is.
These people say they want our president to fail while they wave the flag and call themselves Americans. They call black people racists while insisting that they are not themselves racists and maintain that there is a level playing field for minorities. They also stretch the truth or speak half-truths, and when they are called to account for the words they have uttered, they hide under the cover of First Amendment rights, which they think only apply to them, not to those who don't reek of malicious intent.
Besides the fact that there is a great deal of money to be made by being vicious and reducing our nation to the level of the debauched and decayed Roman Empire-with everything becoming like the public entertainment in the Coliseum-haters and victims are not the watchers and keepers of the flame. Instead, they are the destroyers of dreams and hope. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who watches the watchers?) People in the haters' and victims' group want no scrutiny for their actions and want to be free to criticize everyone else in the most hateful terms.
The Hater and Victim Fear
Fear is not rational. It is an emotional response to something that makes us feel concern for our safety and well-being. Haters and victims will attack groups whose only mission is to champion our rights under the constitution, such as the American Civil Liberties Union. They fear antidefamation leagues because these groups use education and information to defeat the lies and half-truths that feed haters and victims. Associations such as the American Association of Retired People can be vilified for trying to protect some of the most vulnerable among us, the seniors. The Department of Justice is "out to get us": yes, government agents have made mistakes, but these seem to be errors in judgment and not government policy. Agencies such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund are frightening to the haters and victims; they, too, are "out to get us." The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other free trade agreements seem to show the victims and haters that no one is looking out for them. They would have us build walls along our borders and somehow stop globalization and free markets. That boat has left the dock, and there is no turning back. Since one tribe first discovered other tribes, trade has existed, and globalization is the extension of centuries of trade.
The Awareness of Haters and Victims
I was born and raised in Chicago, and I came of age in the 1960s. My mother owned a restaurant in a blue-collar neighborhood filled with small businesses, manufacturing sites, apartments, and some homes. Chicago is a phenomenal city loaded with diversity, and if the United States is a melting pot, then Chicago is Melting Pot Central. My mother's customers were a collage of races, genders, religions, ethnicities, and economic classes. Southern blacks, Asians, Haitians, Jamaicans, Mexicans, Cubans, Jews, Puerto Ricans, Trinidadians, Africans, Native Americans, Appalachian whites, middle-class Caucasians, and professional people, such as lawyers, factory owners, and insurance executives, all were customers.
I frequently say that I was unaware of the haters and victims when I was growing up around this restaurant. The idea that there were people who hated based on skin color or ethnic origin was foreign to me. The idea that there were people who constantly claimed that their problems stemmed from others who were somehow advantaged when they themselves were not was also foreign to me. There were no differences in our customer base to me; they all were customers. They provided me with an education in religions, races, cultures, languages, governments, and why people came to the United States. If victims and haters came in, I was unaware of them. There could have been some there, but the audience was not receptive to their message and the media were not so dedicated to making people hate and feel like victims.
When I was growing up, we read newspapers and listened to radio, and there seemed to be standards for what could and could not be printed or broadcast. Radio was a medium for entertainment and sports; there were few talk shows, and the news shows reported the news. I remember election results being reported in terms of numbers, not in terms of red states and blue states. I remember when the idea of shock radio was a Beatles song. I remember the antiwar protests and the emotion and rhetoric directed to ending the war. When Nixon resigned, I remember a nation disillusioned by his actions, and while there was a smattering of invective heaped on the man, it was tame compared to the daily diatribe flung at anyone in public office today. The Reagan years were the years when I became keenly aware of the victims and haters. The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), better known as Star Wars, the firing of the air traffic controllers, the continued deregulation of industries, and the constant drone of patriotic propaganda were the hallmark of these years.
Here was a popular president who used every political trick in the book to remain popular. His reliance on Cold War rhetoric, well- placed sound bites, and huge budget deficits became topics of argument. If you were not a Reaganite, there was something wrong with you. Heated discussions soon became opportunities for attacks on you, not on his policies. I thought it was a phase or part of a cycle the nation was experiencing, like the McCarthy era, but it never went away. The nation did not grow out of this phase; instead, it grew worse. The person running for the presidency or elected to the presidency became a target for every sort of loathing from the victims and haters.
The more I became aware of this blight that was infecting us the more I began listening and observing. I spent many hours wondering if our nation had always been so negative and ugly. I looked into history and found that our role models in Europe had little to offer us in the way of moderation and compassion. The Spanish Inquisition was a particularly low point in history. Europe had made primogeniture the law of the land. It invented the feudal system to trap peasants. There was no universal education. The law favored landowners and they were the ones who introduced slavery into the New World. The European conquerors certainly showed us how to decimate native populations so the conquerors could acquire their land and resources.
Then I thought about the persecution of the Tories, the forced removal of the Cherokees, and the tainted Dred Scott and Plessey v. Ferguson Supreme Court decisions. While these actions may have been misdirected and deplorable, they did not seem to be part of the nation's evolving identity and we seemed to be following a pattern in history. For the most part, we recorded and studied these events, but today we have added a new twist in recording events.
We now have an inordinate number of screamers and loud, vocal media types who have snake venom in their veins, and this venom flows out of their mouths. We have Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, and Sean Hannity ensuring that hatred and victimhood continue. There are others, but these men have shown that they are more openly preaching the gospel of hate and victimhood than others. Their bottom line is, "If you tell a lie often enough you can make it the truth." In some cases they use words used by Paine and others as part of a title of rants they publish so they can gain some modicum of credibility, however weak.
I have watched documentaries from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, and the haters then seemed to exist in small groups. Over the past four or five decades, we seem to have had an epidemic of haters and victims, and this is not to our collective national advantage. The more we hate, the more we fear, and the more we fear, the more we hate.
Ordinary people are afraid, but they are uncertain about what they fear. They seem to be aligned with Thomas Hobbes and his quote, "Life is nasty, brutish, and short." This idea is alien to most of us, and if asked as individuals, we would indicate some happiness and optimism, but the negativity seems to be the collective thinking of the pack. People are afraid because they have been told to be afraid: of immigration and trade agreements and change. The basis for this fear is anchored in quicksand, but still they must be afraid. In the absence of common sense, education, and personal reflection, the message of hate and victim carries the day. What is little understood is that America is not easy. If you want freedom of speech, than it must apply to all who live here. If you want freedom of the press, than it it must apply to all press.
Manifestation of Haters and Victims
We seem to have lost the ability to trust, respect, and have a meaningful discourse with others. At the first hint of resistance, we shout epithets, initiate confrontations, and in loud voices spew unresolved wrongs out of our mouths. Every action is twisted and turned so even good begins to look bad. Allegations, innuendos, secret agendas, and conspiracies dog our days and blare from televisions. Americans are told to be afraid of terrorists and immigrants and the government. Someone has to tell people who to be afraid of and who the cause of their problems is.
Terror alerts are just one visible piece of how people are manipulated and told to be afraid. Look under the bed and see if someone is hiding there. This is akin to the Communist bogeyman of the 1950s. Someone is going to take our jobs. Some undesirable is going to want our homes or will want to marry our daughters. Everyone is out to get us. We look for slights, insults, and misdeeds. And if we look for these things, we will find them.
For many, everything is personal. Some of us have come to believe that people do things to us and we are the injured parties. We are angry and increasingly hateful, spiteful, and violent. We have become a nation of litigants, proving our victimhood. Some of these litigations are justified, but many are not. We constantly want to make sure we get what is, in our opinion, rightfully ours. We never seem to be satisfied, and we wonder what someone has done for us lately because we have already forgotten yesterday. We carry this invisible bag of wrongs and slights, and when it is full we dump it all over others, even if they were not the cause for the bag being filled.
This victimhood of many Americans extends even to the tobacco industry and the stated victims of cigarette smoking. To the best of my knowledge, no one ever forced anyone to buy cigarettes, light them, and smoke them. While the tobacco companies are culpable for creating entertaining advertising and ensuring that the amount of nicotine and additives in cigarettes would keep smokers smoking, the people accountable for smoking are the smokers. The current climate does not allow for this reasoning, however.
The haters and victims assassinated John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. This list is not complete. Victims elect people to office who often reflect their own level of misinformation and ignorance; somehow they think these politicians will look out for their constituents' interests more than their own. The proof of this was clearly shown in the 2000 election in Florida. Never was it clearer that there was a need for caution about those we elect to local and state government because when we elect people who rise to their own level of mediocrity, we will certainly not be satisfied with our choices.
We talk about immigrants as if immigrant were a four-letter word, and most of us seem to have forgotten that our own citizenship is a gift from those who immigrated here earlier. We live with misinformation and promote chain e-mails that are lies, and if a lie is repeated often enough it becomes the truth. Minorities, gays, lesbians, Native Americans, non- Christians, and women are all groups receiving the opprobrium of the haters and victims. Tolerance and justice are forgotten. Hate, violence, discrimination, prejudice, and bigotry mark our days.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Nation of Haters and Victims by Ruth E. Todd Copyright © 2010 by Ruth E. Todd. Excerpted by permission.
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