Psychotic Reactions
by Chris Stevenson
What I'm seeing out of white republicans nowadays is something I haven't consistently seen since I was in high school; a self brainwashing or hard-wishful-thing or something I once called Detachable Thinking. Talk show host Glenn Beck literally expressed a desire to remove the race factor out of Civil Rights. This is akin to me saying I like water, but I wish someone would remove the H2O. Of course Beck is on the record for stating that he doesn't agree with Social Justice so it's safe to assume he really doesn't like Civil Rights either. So why would he publicly call for a rally at the Lincoln Memorial on the 47th Anniversary of his "I Have a Dream" speech, ask the niece of Martin Luther King and other blacks to participate and spend the last several months on the air extolling the virtues of King and other Civil Rights leaders? It's not that Beck doesn't know better, but his wishes have overridden his intellect. That's the scary part.
Beck is leading an army of whites and a few blacks into a socio/political Twilight Zone; a middle-aged white adolescence fantasy that sadly see's many republican lawmakers in concert with him. For instance, can you picture a republican politician calling members of the Obama Administration "job killers," while at the same time speaking out against extended unemployment benefits and funds for some states to specifically save the jobs of Teachers, Police Officers and Firefighters? Of course you can. It's becoming as commonplace as a pro-traditional family conservative coming out years later to disclose that he's gay. It's stunning hypocrisy, especially when I think of the police; whom I thought were enjoying high respect from the "tough on crime" GOP. Today these conservatives will blindly hurt anybody just to spite President Obama. Nothing is out of bounds anymore.
Lately Ohio's John Boehner; the House Minority Leader said during a recent speech in Cleveland "We've tried 19 months of government-as-community-organizer. It hasn't worked," Boehner told USA Today. He then called for the President to fire Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and National Economic Council head Lawrence Summers. The commonality with many on the right is their rush to claim Obama's measures haven't worked. They know full well it will take years for most of them to work. So with absurd and backwards mindsets that have started since the fall of '08 we are seeing a growing trend of psychotic reactions in response to the very presence of an African American President. During my high school years many South Buffalo white boys loved Jimi Hendrix, but wished he wasn't black. I know this from talking and listening to some of them. They missed the whole point. Music from a white Hendrix would have sounded very different. A white Hendrix is simply a louder version of Bob Dylan; Great songwriting, but average musicianship. Not only would a white Hendrix music been drastically changed, rock music would have been completely altered.
Detaching a face or a skin-color from a historic figure or event has a devastating effect that our minds could never comprehend. It now dawns on me that what Beck seems to be angling for today is a similar devastating transformation. A gradual removal of the black struggle (and ultimately blacks) from the Civil Rights Movement. Only to replace us with his poor, struggling, Tea Party minions as the new fighter, the new marchers, the new victims of racial injustice... and Obama as the new Bull Conner. I'm almost laughing, but Beck's version of Detachable thinking is very self-imposed from out of his own Micky Mouse-sized brain and he is gradually, openly selling it to the public as a broad-based concept of disconnecting-not race but-blacks from the Civil Rights Movement.
This really shouldn't come as a surprise, blacks have a history of white people, liberal or conservative, attempting to homogenize or whitewash a black struggle. Beck has full knowledge of the painful circumstances that prompted the need for King's March on Washington and King's "Dream" speech. The fact is, the philosophical shift of the two major parties wasn't complete. So when he says "we started this," he's referring largely to republicans of the period. Beck's Restoring Honor (Restore Hubris?) rally now elevates him to my too-dangerous-to-ignore level on my political periscope.
Chris Stevenson is a syndicated columnist, his articles also appear in the Challenger Community News and buffalo bullet. Follow him on Twitter, Btweetz.com, blackcommentator and facebook. Respond to him on comment section below.
