Everybody take a breath

By Edward Copeland

What in the world is wrong with us? As the threatening instances linked to tea party activists and health care opponents seem to accumulate, I find myself scratching my head in disbelief. I guess I shouldn't. Back during the election, at Palin rallies where she egged on participants by suggesting that Barack Obama "palled around with domestic terrorists" she'd be greeted with shouts of "kill him." When John McCain actually stood up to the paranoids at one of his campaign events who expressed fright at the prospect of an Obama presidency or repeated the idea that he wasn't born in the United States, his own supporters actually booed him.

Since that time, there have been attacks on law enforcement officials, the murder of people by a man who said he killed them because he couldn't get to those named as threats to America in Bernard Goldberg's book, the assassination of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller by someone who supposedly is "pro-life" and the murder of a guard at the Holocaust Museum by an old hatemonger who was found to have birther literature in his car. Does anyone really believe these people are overreacting because of a law that stops discrimination against people with preexisting conditions? Are people being pushed to extremes because they are so outraged of the idea that parents will be able to keep their children on their health insurance plans until they are 26? PolitiFact has begun debunking an insane chain e-mail making the rounds chock full of lies about what opponents want people to believe is in the health care bill.

House Republican Minority Whip Eric Cantor did have a bit of a point when he mentioned that he'd had threats and incidents against him, but he didn't publicize them. It is always something to think about. The Secret Service doesn't issue a press release every time there is a threat made against a president. When a company receives a bomb threat, there always is a debate about whether or not to report it for fear it will only spawn more. The same goes with foiled terrorist plots. Still, he's being disingenuous if he doesn't think the Republicans haven't fanned the flames of lunacy by not speaking more forcefully against the threats and language of violence before.

It's not that those on the left have never gone overboard either. For too many years now, the losing side of a presidential election have been unable to treat the winner as legitimate and they must. That's the way our democracy works. Elections have consequences. Some members of the tea party are doing the right thing. Republicans they don't like they are challenging in primaries. That's what you are supposed to do. Some labor unions are upset about the way some members of Congress switched their votes around on the health care bill. Are they throwing bricks through windows or leaving threatening voicemails? No, they are trying to find challengers to the specific candidates in their primaries. This is what we are supposed to do.

Everyone needs to relax. If you disagree with what your elected representatives have done, vote against them when the time comes. If they still win, that's the breaks. I live in a state where my U.S. senators are Tom Coburn and James Inhofe. Want to talk about taxation without representation? Still, as much as I despise these men and as often as I've voted against them to no avail, I've never threatened them, cut gas lines to their homes or tosses bricks through their offices. Everyone, no matter what side of the political spectrum you are on, need to act like that. If you cannot and you still feel the urge to react violently, you owe to yourself and everyone around you to turn yourself in to the nearest mental health facility and get the help you so desperately need.

While I have leaned toward the left for a long time, I vote Democratic because it's my only option and it saddens me. I wish that somehow the Republicans could right their ship so that in an ideal world I'd actually have a choice between two candidates when I vote (in a really ideal world, there would be more than two choices). It's disheartening that one party has thrown itself so completely in bed with extremists, excommunicating its own moderates, so that they aren't a choice for me and I'm left with a party I mostly agree with but which is very often less than perfect. If only we had a true democracy, with real choices and real candidates, lost the craziness and brought back civility to debates about issues.