Anger is the emotion of the day. Homeowners are angry. The unemployed are angry. Voters are angry. Conservatives are especially angry, and Tea Partiers are the angriest of all. A New York Times poll shows that 6 out of 10 voters don’t like their own representative. And, by gosh, we’re going to throw them out, those who haven’t already been thrown out in the primaries. They’re all a bunch of greedy politicians beholden to lobbyists who’ve lost touch with the voters. So we’re going to make John Boehner, the most beholden to lobbyists of them all, Speaker of the House. And we’re going to put the folks back in power who got us in this mess in the first place, because, by gosh, the people we replaced them with two years ago didn’t get us out of it fast enough. Because they’re socialists, we think, or something worse, like Big Government Big Taxing Big Spenders and we need to boot them out and replace them with the Small Government Tax Cutting Big Spenders who waged two wars and cut taxes without paying for it, and who want Big Government out of the business of telling the bankers who destroyed the economy they can’t do that again, because that’s Socialism or Government Meddling in the Marketplace–or something. And we don’t want Obamacare because if we all have health insurance it will lead us down the path to what those stupid Europeans have, which is much better health care than we have, but they do it with Socialism and Big Government, and we don ‘t do that, even if it means that w’re sicker and we die younger and we go bankrupt because of medical costs. And mostly we’re angry, ANGRY with Obama because we’ve noticed that he’s just not quite like us.
As deeply satisfying as it is to feel that righteous rage burning deep inside, I’m beginning to think that blind fury is not necessarily the best approach to solving our problems, or to choosing a government.
Perhaps instead we should get some help with that anger problem of ours.
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