AlterNet: How Much Damage Has Eight Years of Conservative Rule Done to Americans' Psyches?

[marmar]

How Much Damage Has Eight Years of Conservative Rule Done to Americans' Psyches?

By Mark Klempner, AlterNet. Posted October 29, 2008.

The Bush administration used a politics of fear to diminish our ability to think critically and to erode our capacity to love.



When I was a teen growing up in Schenectady, N.Y., during the early '70s, I had an alcoholic neighbor whose favorite saying was, "The trouble with people is that they are no damn good." I was friends with his son, and whenever I'd go over to hang out at his house, his father would sidle up to me as though we were in a cocktail lounge, put his hand on my shoulder, and mutter his cranky credo.

I didn't immediately make the connection between his soft-spoken, liquor-laced presentation and my own father's hard, locked-in mistrust of people and the world. But I realize now that if drink could have loosened my father's tongue, he probably would have said the same thing.

As a child, my father experienced the anti-Semitism of the Poles and then barely escaped the Holocaust, fleeing Warsaw with his family just one week before Hitler invaded. Still, that doesn't explain everything. Anne Frank, born five years after my father, got trapped in the same genocide he escaped. And yet, holed up in her hiding place with Nazis prowling the streets below, she wrote in her diary, "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart."

I don't think she was naive. On the same page, she writes of feeling "the suffering of millions," of being able to hear the "ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too." Yet she held onto her belief in the goodness of humanity.

Over the years I've come to realize how much our basic opinion about humanity has vast repercussions -- not only on our personal lives, but also on our politics. If you assume people are "no damn good," you will probably favor more police officers and prisons, and you may not see anything wrong with capital punishment. You will also favor fences, walls and barriers of all kinds, and believe that it is prudent and perhaps necessary to own a gun. It's likely you will have supported George W. Bush in his pre-emptive war against Iraq, maybe even after you learned that he depended on lies and deceptions to carry it out. After all, life is about choosing the lesser of two evils. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/104906/how_much_damage_has_eight_years_of_conservative_rule_done_to_americans%27_psyches/

[seafan]

1. "All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing." ----Edmund Burke

The only way out is forward.


How Much Damage Has Eight Years of Conservative Rule Done to Americans' Psyches?

By Mark Klempner
October 29, 2008.

.....

People with some degree of wisdom understand that nearly everyone is an alloy of good and evil. They recognize, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, that "the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts." They also recognize that most people do not want to live in a world where "people are no damn good" and where fear, anger, hatred and war prevail.

Perhaps the hardest truth for progressives to face is how the profound political and moral disappointments of the last eight years have eroded our own sense of hope and our own belief that the electorate can become more informed and less divided. We, too, hate "the Other," but it is the guy in the grocery store with a hunting jacket and six-pack, or the woman behind us at the gas pump with a "Rush is Right" sticker on her Suburban. We, too, have swallowed the banefully binary worldview of the present administration that reduces everything to "us" and "them."
This touches on a confounding problem, one that helps to explain how things have gotten so tangled up: Those of us who have the gumption to push for social or political change encounter formidable obstacles that sometimes discourage us to the point of burnout.

.....

And yet it is difficult in these times to feel our own goodness. The validity of torture as a political tool is debated on the front pages of our newspapers, as our president smilingly strips away huge swaths of our constitutional rights. When our highest elected officials act shamefully and irresponsibly in our name, it has to take a toll on our psyches. And, indeed, in some ways our reputation with ourselves has fallen as low as our reputation with the rest of the world. This is what happens when one has a government in which corrupt people are on top while persons of integrity are subservient or shunted aside.

The fact remains, however, that there are some truly great people in the United States, and a multitude of people with high ideals and a willingness to sacrifice for the good of all. Our leadership simply doesn't reflect us.
When Bush got in, all the neocons came out of the closet, but if Barack Obama wins, their divisive strategies will be challenged. The White House will no longer welcome or be a home to born-again bigots, torture apologists, habeas corpus revokers and the rest of the industriofascist entourage. I also expect that censored truth commissions, muzzled scientists, harassed librarians, bought appointees and coerced generals will cease to be an issue under Obama's leadership. As he extricates us from Iraq, perhaps he could deliver us and the Iraqis from the Shock and Awe strategists, Blackwater barbarians and Halliburton robber barons.

But none of this can happen without our making a renewed commitment to once again throw ourselves into the struggle and subject our hearts to the dizzying roller-coaster whereby our dreams are brought within our grasp, but might just as suddenly be snatched away.
A crucial part of our work will be to resurrect our essential vision of human goodness, and specifically our own goodness as a nation. This is something Obama alluded to repeatedly in his speech at the Democratic National Convention, reminding us that "we are better than these last eight years. We are a better country than this."

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[Demeter]

2. 8 Years? Try 30

Even Clinton was not able to reverse that trend started by Reagan--he just stalled it for a bit, distracted it by being such a big target...which they couldn't hit anyway!