You may have seen this. TPM LiveWire at Google Analytics has a story by Justin Elliott from March 19, 2010 about a man with Parkinson's disease who walked over to a bunch of teabaggers protesting healthcare and sat down in their midst. He was carrying a sign that read "Got Parkinson's? I Do and You Might. Thanks for Helping! That's Community!"
It stands to reason that wasn't going to go over well. It didn't.
The man was Bob Letcher, who is 60 and who taught technology and science at Ohio State in the years when he was able to.
A teabagger told him, "If you're looking for a handout, you're in the wrong part of town. Nothing for free over here. You have to work for everything you get." A nice thing to say to someone who would love to work but can't.
Another protester said, "No, no. I'll pay for this guy. Here you go, start a pot. I'll pay for you." He put a dollar bill in the man's lap. Then he dropped the sarcasm and added, "I'll decide when to give you money," and he threw another dollar at him.
You may have thought it was exaggeration when I relayed a reported quote from a teabagger about his wanting the uninsured to die on the hospital steps rather than receive government help. You can see from this episode that that might just be the norm for teabaggers.
They are saying that what I possess is mine absolutely, that I have earned it unconditionally, that nothing can legitimately hedge my ownership of it. That assumes, of course, that my ability to earn it was not leveraged by good fortune or government policies that favored one group over others. In other words, it assumes something that can't be true. It overlooks our system's built-in biases and inequalities and the differences in our backgrounds that give some an edge over others.
If they were saying that those who can work should work and contribute, that would be fine. But they are going well beyond that.
The teabaggers are lucky and wealthy. Their idea is that if you are not, then they get to decide whether you live or die. In their worldview, this is axiomatic. It is the opposite of what they call being socialist and what the rest of humanity refers to as being civilized.
All of Hebrew civilization, all of Christian civilization, and all of Islamic civilization have rejected their idea decisively in favor of human equality and a conception of justice based on equality. Similarly, according to the Eastern conception of karma, we are one and the things we do to distinguish ourselves have no finality.
The teabaggers' attitude is most likely a secularized residue of the old belief among some Protestants that they are the chosen ones and that wealth is the outward sign of God's favor, so that the poor are impoverished and improvident because God means to damn them.
The baggers go to their churches and hear that the first shall be last, the last first. And they don't believe it for a minute.
So it's the tea-drinkers against everybody. But that seems to be how they like it. They feed on their frustration and outrage.
It may be that they have so numbed themselves with their materialistic values and their sense of entitlement that nothing except getting furious and lashing out can still make them feel alive.
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