The delusional, fantasy world of the Kool-aid Cult. [View All]

[Cleita]

The cult of the Kool-aid drinking conservative didn’t spring out of the ground fully grown. There is a set of events that occured first, which caused them to accept the cup of Kool-aid, drink it, and make it their Holy Grail.

The very first thing that happens to anyone when they start to think for themselves is a pre-event that causes them to look at their world and question why things are the way they are. They try to make sense of it. This is familiar to all of us when we first realize that our world is a far cry from Disneyland. Liberals apply critical thinking to the circumstances and then formulate ideas of how things could be made better.

Conservatives, instead, pull back in to a fictional version of how life should be. They imagine their utopian world from the influences that surround them, television, movies, family and church. From this the conservative creates a fantasy world that he believes in, that he should inhabit, and he blames everyone but himself for the actual world he does inhabit.

To begin with there is a strong distrust of people that are not like him. For many, it’s a strong and unashamed racism that has been passed down from generation to generation. Before the civil rights movement of the sixties, there was no attempt to hide it, or act to end it. People of different races and ethnicities, lived in separate neighborhoods, they attended separate schools, separate churches. People of color were denied many jobs except for the menial ones.

This is the order in the universe that conservatives like. It’s the idea of the Country Club, a place that most of them are also locked out of as well, but that they can aspire to. If they jump throught the right hoops, and make the best decisions to impress the holders of the membership, they might be accepted.

This is what the nostalgia about the fifties is about. In the fifties because of unions, and the GI bill, working class, white men could own homes and cars, go to college and in general achieve the middle class status they desired. It was their children who aspired to the Country Club. It wasn’t that easy for people of color who were still segregated, by law in the south, and by custom in the rest of the country.

Today, the move to gated communities and sending children to private schools so they can be insulated from the outside world is an outcome of this. The excuses of course are to keep out crime and make neighborhoods safe. Nevermind that the best cat burglar in Beverly Hills in the 1980’s was a young white man who strolled the neighborhoods in a tuxedo in broad daylight while he burglarized the homes of the rich and famous.

Nobody took any notice of him including the police and the numerous private security companies that patrolled the neighborhoods. Nevermind that if poor neighborhoods had the same police protection and security that the affluent ones have, they too would have a lower crime rate, maybe even lower than the the affluent ones.

After the civil rights movement of the sixties and seventies, things started to get messier. Professional white people found themselves working next to or, even for a person of color. Ethnic minorities and people of color were buying homes in formerly all white neighborhoods. Eateries and stores brought ethnic food and goods into these neighborhoods. Liberal white people embraced the diversity. They loved the differences.

Conservatives, on the other hand, moved further and further away from the cities and into their gated, suburban communities so they wouldn’t have to mingle. They still had to go to work though and quietly, and then not so quietly, grumbled about the promotion they should have gotten that went to a black man. Or a woman! They grumbled about the signs on the store fronts in languages that weren’t English. They grumbled about the different languages they heard spoken at the workplace and tried to make English only rules effected

Those uppity women of the feminist movement didn’t help. Nostalgic for the cookie baking, stay at home mom in “Ozzie and Harriet”, “Life With Father”, “Leave It To Beaver” and “The Donna Reed Show”, they blamed working women for the rise in juvenile deliquency, teenage pregnancy and dirty homes.

Women were blamed for collecting welfare so they could stay home and raise their kids when there was no job or wage earner in the home. The conservatives saw no reason to support a child that wasn’t their own. Here, blame the victim was born. Here the myth of the welfare queen was born.

Now along comes Rush Limbaugh and he stirs the pot of all these discontents that are stewing in the formerly privileged communities. He tells his listeners what they want to hear. He tells them that they can have that fantasy land that they so desire if only they get rid of those liberals, who made these problems.

They can have that neighborhood with the elm trees and picket fences, where children ride their bicycles and they won’t be stolen when they leave them in the front yard. They can have the job with the benefits, to pay for all this, if the corporations can have fewer regulations on them, so they can make more money to pay them a better salary.

Of course what’s unsaid but implied is that these are white, Christian neighborhoods. The only people of color allowed in are the maids and gardeners and they’d better be out of the neighborhood before sundown. At first it was a blame the liberals game, but no one had yet advocated imprisoning them or poisoning them like they are today.

In the decades that followed, the Churches, seeing a chance for more money from the collection plates started pandering to these prejudices in their congregations, couching the bigotry in terms of morality and immorality. By this time the more openly visible gay community was pushing for more civil rights and the churches zeroed right into a demography they could attack and demonize without much objection from the mainstream straight community.

Soon, all the Rush Limbaugh wannabes arrived on the scene, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage for starters spouting the same bigotry blaming everyone else for the fact that their fantasy land wasn’t achievable until we got rid of the liberals. When these people arrived on the air waves, it was the Kool-aid that they offered that the conservatives drank from. It created the Kool-aid Cult and then there was no going back.

They were able to impeach and harrass then President Clinton for being immoral. They were able to push a cretin like George Bush in front of the electorate because the Kool-aid Cult believed them when they were told he was an honorable Christian and a common speaking guy just like them.

The Kool-aid Cult believed him when he told them they would get tax cuts. Then when 9-11 happened they were able to convince the Kool-aid Cult that the terrorists came from a country that they didn’t come from. They still managed to convince the Kool-aid Cult to trust George Bush to keep the American people safe, a safety valve didn’t seem to apply to those Americans who were shipped to war a half a world away.

When atrocity after atrocity is revealed about the Bush administration, they were told by the Kool-aid Cult chorus, Rush, Sean, Bill and Michael, that it was all good if George did it because he keeps you safe, so torture is fine if George says so. Invading a sovereign nation and murdering it’s civilians is fine if George says so. Letting African-American people fend for themselves and die after a hurricane, because they have more AIDS, is fine because George said so, and they were stupid because they didn’t leave when they were told to. Never mind that many of them couldn’t!

So I really just have a question. When will the members of this cult stop drinking the Kool-aid? Or will they have to keep drinking it because to stop cold-turkey and gain sobriety would make them face up to the truth that they approved of the crimes committed by the Bush administration in their names?

What will it take to make them sober up and face up to reality? The fantasy world they want never did exist nor will it ever. Until we start treating our fellow human beings as we want to be treated, no matter how different they are from us, we won’t be able form a truly egalitarian and peaceful society. Jesus and Buddha and other great philosphers in the world have said the same.

So conservatives what will it take to sober you up and help the rest of us to get our country back before the cretins in the White House bring us nuclear war? What’s it going to take, CNN, MSNBC, FOX, ABC, CBS? What’s it going to take to get you to stop your greedy grab for profits and to start reporting the whole truth about what is going on before these cretins lead us into nuclear war?

What’s it going to take to not have a nuclear war?