Tuesday, July 20
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Tea Party Nation released a statement Monday declaring, “The Tea Party Movement is not racist.”
Judson Phillips, founder of the Tea Party Nation, said his group had to respond because “this is becoming an issue for the whole movement.”
“We are having to react to this quickly because this is the line that the other side wants to hit us with — that we are all racists. If they can make that story stick, it will destroy the effectiveness of the movement,” Phillips said.
Last August I wrote a post called “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Health Insurance Reform“. When the post hit my Facebook page it ignited quite a discussion…one that ultimately led me to de-friending an old friend on Facebook, and in real life as well.
During this process, the friend in question offered to give me $50 to pay for Health Insurance. While I don’t believe he intended the offer in malice, to me it showed a genuine lack of respect for me as an individual, and a fundamental chasm between the way he and like-minded others looked at their fellow humans.
It wasn’t until I saw this video of a recent Tea Party protest where one angry protester throws dollars at a man with Parkinson’s that I realized the reason why I reacted so negatively to his offer. My friend, regardless of intent, made me feel like the guy with Parkinson’s, sitting silently on the ground while insults and dollars are thrown at him, essentially telling him, “We’re healthy and rich, you’re sick and poor, now go fuck off!” If you haven’t seen the video, here it is:
We live in a world of our own making. How we treat our neighbors, family, friends…even when we disagree is the greatest measure of our humanity.
Before the de-friending occurred, somewhere amidst a $50 Paypal transfer and my outright shock of the depth of his self-entitled rant, he forwarded me a Glenn Beck video and asked me to watch it. Having never actually watched Glenn Beck’s show, I acquiesced. This turned out to be a bad descision.
Thinking that somehow Glenn Beck would convince me that Health Care Reform in this country would lead to Nazism in America was possibly THE WORST argument he could have presented. Here’s the ACTUAL VIDEO he sent me asking me my “honest opinion.”
I honestly didn’t know what to say. Trying to follow Glenn Beck’s line of reasoning or finding accuracy in his logic is like trying build a house of cards with a retarded kid who just keeps screaming “UNO! UNO! UNO!”
So yesterday, after my epiphany about the Tea Party Parkinson’s video, when I saw this brilliant rant about Glenn Beck by Jon Stewart, it all tied together for me:
This is how I lost a friend in the Health Care Reform debate: Compassion.
You see, you can’t quantify compassion. You can’t solve compassion with an equation or by throwing dollars at people any more than you can draw conclusions by drawing circles on a blackboard. When someone is sick, you shouldn’t have to ask if they can afford to live.
It shouldn’t even be a factor.
It’s not my job or my mission to convince my ex-friend otherwise. It just made me sad that he doesn’t see just how wrong he is. Or how he made me feel. Or how he chooses to treat his fellow man. He lacks the fundamental human capacity for compassion. And I choose to not to live in his compassionless world.
If we live in a world of our own design…of our own making…I want mine to be a compassionate world. A happy world. A world where someone with Parkinson’s or Asthma or Cancer doesn’t have to be mocked or condescended to because they are sick, or worry about whether or not their insurance provider will cover this particular trip to the emergency room. That’s MY American dream.
Unfortunately there are some friendships that have been sacrificed along the way. I’ll gladly trade those for logic and reason and compassion any day.
Now I’m going to go outside and enjoy the rest of this beautiful spring day. You should too!
The level of anger and hatred displayed by the Tea Party protesters in this video is appalling. Simply appalling. I can not believe actual human beings would act this way towards another person.
One white dude in a tie, khaki pants and donning shades and a cell phone strapped to his belt can be seen literally THROWING DOLLARS at another man who sits silently on the ground with a sign that reads “Got Parkinson’s? I do and you might. Thanks for helping.”
These Tea Party protesters have fallen into the trap of becoming so entrenched in their principles that they’ve forgotten how to be a human being….how to be an American.
True Americans care. True patriots don’t scream or throw angry dollars at others who have debilitating diseases (remember when Rush Limbaugh mocked Michael J. Fox, saying he was faking his shakes?). This kind of behavior is similar to what we were seeing last summer during the “Town Hall Meetings”. I dubbed it Angryface syndrome.
It’s also why I’ve lost total respect for anyone who chooses to associate themselves with the Tea Party. The Tea Party is filled to the brim with closet racists, religious fanatics and some of the most hateful and narrow-minded people in the country. They’re not patriots, they’re self-entitled scumbags who don’t deserve any compassion.
They certainly display no capacity for compassion in this video. Don’t take my word for it…watch the pleated pants dickwad for yourself:
YouTube – Tea Partiers Mock And Scorn Apparent Parkinson’s Victim.
Warning, what you will see in this video includes predominantly white, overweight, ignorant Americans who attended the Glenn Beck 9/12 Tea Party protest in Washington D.C. this past weekend.
To these people, Communism, Fascism and Socialism are pretty much the same thing. (6:01)
To these people, the Bible says that Barack Obama’s name means “Antichrist”. (4:51)
To these people, Obama is giving land to Czars. (7:41)
To these people, Obama is a Muslim. (4:22)
YouTube – 9.12 DC TEA PARTY – MARCH FOOTAGE WITH INTERVIEWS.
They later corrected the error, noting that it might be used to by liberals to “discredit the undeniably massive turnout”.
She’s right to be worried — it absolutely will be used that way. If you don’t want to be discredited, then don’t tell a ridiculous (and easily disprovable) lie.
FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: Size Matters; So Do Lies.
