I Wish It Wasn’t So Easy To See Through The Rhetoric

I wish it wasn’t so easy to see right through so much of what comes out of groups like today’s Tea Party.  But when you grow up surrounded by that type of thinking, it leaps out from even the most nuanced rhetoric.

If your local paper didn’t carry Al Hunt’s column earlier this week, it is an excellent and balanced perspective along with some historical context on what is becoming the same old “nativist” argument that has surfaced so many times in this country’s history.

The code words change although not wanting to pay taxes has always been a constant, meaning “not if it benefits anyone who isn’t just like me.”

People like Pierre Chamois, from whom I descend, fled to this continent in the mid 1600’s to escape the very persecution to which nativist thinking leads.  The same thinking drove other ancestors to the west and even led to their disenfranchisement in Idaho at one time.

Oh yeah!  For me, this crap is personal.  We need to take this country back alright, take it back from the reactionary right.  People like the guy from Raleigh who wrote the now infamous letter-to-the-editor threatening violence if votes don’t go his way…he’s just more transparent than most.

Hunt is right when he writes that “History is never kind to these Nativists.”  But that doesn’t mean they won’t stoop to violence. 

But we need to vote and vote big time to send a message to these clowns…that we intend to fight just as hard as my ancestors did to keep this country free and open to immigration.