I don’t want to scare anyone, but there are crazies walking among us. Even worse, over the past year and a half, they have become more and more visible, showing up at rallies across the nation to protest the government, and just about anything in between that procreates.
One sect of the crazies, the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, showed up in Gainesville this past weekend to protest homosexuals, Jews, Catholics, Methodists, Catholics again and President Obama.
Watching them picketing the Hillel, I observed signs declaring, “God Hates Your Children,” “Your Rabbi is a Whore,” “Antichrist Obama” and “Fags are the beast.”
Looks like the congregants also hate decency.
But these people are batshit crazy. You simply can’t communicate with them. The views they hold and the views of mainstream America pass each other like ships in the night. But ill-guided religious fanaticism is just a small part of the crazies rising in this country. The Tea Party movement is another part. Yes, the principles of the movement and the vast majority of the movement’s followers and leaders are not crazy. On the contrary, they are mostly wealthy and educated, as one New York Times/CBS poll revealed last week. And while the Tea Party movement may be guilty of not only appealing to the lowest common denominators in our society, but relishing doing so, their message of small government is one that still deserves to be heard.
Unfortunately, more and more the vitriol in the movement’s outer fringe is getting out of hand. In March, right as health care reform was entering the final legislative home stretch, tea partiers in Washington, D.C., began hurling racial epithets at two black congressmen, and howled sexual slurs at Barney Frank, the openly gay congressman from Massachusetts. In another case, a man protesting health care reform at a tea party rally verbally accosted a man who told the gatherers he had Parkinson’s disease. Chris Reichert, the uptight scolder, has since apologized for his actions, telling the Columbus Dispatch that he “snapped.” And just this past Monday, armed gun rights activists in northern Virginia and unarmed activists in Washington, D.C., protested the government’s supposed infringement of the Second Amendment. Never mind that the White House hasn’t signaled any desire to curb gun rights since Obama took office. Fittingly, the rally was held on the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, a catastrophic event in American history caused by delusional anti-government fanatics.
So it seems that this is the year of delusional voter anger. And while it may be easy to dismiss the “patriots” who want to take back the country from some great conspiratorial force as only former high school misfits who have suddenly been handed a megaphone and a flag from Walmart, we would all do good to remember that in a climate of rage — no matter how delusional — it only takes one nut from the fringe of these movements to ruin a nice day.
Matt Christ is a political science and journalism sophomore. His columns appear every other Wednesday.
