I like watching and studying social movements. Understanding how people organize to take political action is exciting stuff! It's democracy in action. I love it! So lately I have to admit the Tea Party Patriot movement has me at a loss. I keep trying to figure out this small but very vocal minority. Why do they think like they do? Death panels! A "government take-over of health-care"! Obama is a socialist! (I wish!) Their claims are so outrageous, I wouldn't think most people would be gullible enough to fall for them but they do; at least a small number of them (including many members of my birth family) are.
Then I had a revelation today. It occurred to me today that these people are post-modernists. They don't see the same facts the rest of us do. Seriously. Reality is completely subjective to them. They get these chain emails that say stuff like "Page 425 of the Health Care Bill says that everyone on Social Security... will go to MANDATORY counseling every 5 years to learn and choose from ways to end your suffering (and your life). Health care will be denied based on age... etc". I am not making this up. This is quoted verbatim from an email my mom sent me. And it doesn't matter that there is no "Health Care Bill" and no page 425 of any of the current proposals out there says anything like that. They believe it anyway. You can tell these people anything!
Part of it is just not being educated. For one, they don't really know how the legislative process works. They might've learned in high school but they have forgotten a lot apparently when they talk about "the President's health care bill". The President doesn't write or introduce bills in Congress. Legislators do that. There can't be any President's anything bill.
They don't follow legislation on any subject enough to know that Congress would never, ever name anything something as plain as "Health Care Bill"! It's gonna be The Renew America and Create Opportunities for Everyone Act or The Universal Hugs and Kisses for Puppies and Kittens Everywhere Act. (Somewhere it must've been written into the rule book that all titles of proposed legislation must consist only of any combination of about 200 positive-sounding adjectives.) So the fact that the email talks about "the Health Care Bill" doesn't make them at all suspicious.
And they certainly don't have any idea what socialism is. They just remember the Cold War and the evil Soviet Empire. To be a socialist is a very, very bad thing. Obama is a very bad man so he must be a socialist! Of course!
All of this is making me very discouraged and worried. A democracy depends on having a mostly educated public making decisions (and electing smart people to make other decisions). What does it mean that so many people either don't care enough or are too lazy to get all the facts about important national debates?
I don't mean to slight postmodernists or post-modernism with this somewhat tongue-in-cheek lamentation. Anyone who's read enough of this blog knows that I love post-modern epistemologies and I don't believe in absolutes, but I'm also a materialist. Postmodernism is fine for abstract concepts but for the material world (the tangible world)... well, maybe I'm an Empiricist after all because I do believe there are certain things that either exist or they don't and "page 425 of the Health Care Bill" as quoted above doesn't exist.
But I sure as hell don't know how to convince my post-modern mother of that!
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