The Emergency Room on Election Day?

The emergency room on election day?  Why was I there?  As a patient!  Read on.

This election was really nerve racking for me.  The reasons for it were things that happened both before, during, and after the Republican Primary season, and all of the debates.  I’ll list them, not in any order because I didn’t take notes for one thing as to which came first, but these are what are in my memory.

One of the first events that really impressed me was when Rick Perry acknowledged that Texas had more executions than any other state, and the audience cheered.  Death is a good thing for ‘those people’.  Whoever they are, but then, they’re not us.

We had the audience who booed the gay soldier who had called in from either Iraq or Afghanistan to ask what the candidate’s opinion was on the military policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell”.  This was a young man who was putting his life in danger to protect that audience, and they booed the fact that he acknowledged he was gay. 

We had Mitt Romney stating he would eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood, regardless of the fact that the organization receives no federal funding for the 3% of its clients who have abortions, while the rest of the services are for women’s health, like cancer screening.  For the first time in my life I donated to Planned Parenthood I was so angry.

Who could forget Romney’s infamous talk to a group of his peers, discussing how different the 47% were from them.  And how much less as humans the 47% are.

Arizona passed their infamous 1070 law that allowed law enforcement to stop anyone who had committed any transgression, no matter how small, and ask them for their “papers”, making Hispanics or anyone who is darker into someone not like “us”.

We had Todd Akin and his “legitimate rape” comments, and Richard Murdock and his comments that pregnancy after rape was something God intended.  Then of course there were Rush Limbaugh’s horrible attacks on Sandra Fluke, and Romney’s spineless comments regarding those attacks. 

There was the transvaginal probe (I never in my youth thought I would ever write something like that) discussion, and the two women State Senators who mentioned the word vagina in whatever state legislature that was and were silenced and forbidden to speak in the chambers because of their “offensive” language.

This was not all in the past.  Currently the GOP controlled House of Representatives is refusing to pass the Violence Against Women Act because it contains provisions that also protect Native American women and women who may be in this country illegally.  What?  They don’t need protection as well as white women?

Sometime ago a good friend of mine told me that my mind “crochets” connections between events that others often don’t see.  In this case I was crocheting connections between all of the articles I had read on what describes an authoritarian, or totalitarian, government, and what these events meant to me.  What I was hearing was either an accidental or intentional marginalizing of “the other”.  That is, people who were different in color or culture from white people, or women who did not “behave” the way white men thought they should act.  This last I find very distressing since it is the way I was raised.  Nice girls didn’t speak, dress, act outside the generally accepted norms set down by the leaders of our culture, who were by definition, male.

I could see in this election a frightening drift toward an authoritarian, or totalitarian, form of government where workers (unions), women, people of color were of little or no value other than what they could provide to the elite of the country.  The population was being divided into “makers or takers” societal slots.  If one received any government assistance because of need, then one was a “taker”, and to be denigrated.  If one received subsidies from the government for one’s business that is deemed to be the way things should be.  Of course, no one mentioned that profits produced by these subsidies found their way into the pockets of the business people.  After all, they worked hard for those profits!  The workers were expected to work hard as well, but that was their lot in life.  Not to worry about them.

For my birthday this year, I received a little book from someone who teaches Holocaust studies at a community college.  The book is a compilation of thoughts from people who survived the camps, and the first and second generations to follow them.  There are historical comments as well.  The title is, “We Are What We Remember”, compiled by Konrad Gorg.  (In German, there is an umlaut over the ‘o’.)  On page 64 is a comment by Harald Welzer.  His citation is in German, so if you want to know what it is, look him up.  The title of his comment is ‘shifting baselines’.

The Nazi era provides an insight

From which one can learn something about the process

in which people choose inhumanity willingly,

indifferently or reluctantly.

The emergence of such a process is not a specifically German phenomenon.

There have been other genocides after the Holocaust

and their starting point is always a ‘categorical distinction between human groups.’

Such distinctions, however, do not remain abstract,

but were regularly translated into a social practice,

in which one considers it to be self-evident

that for different groups exist different laws and standards of conduct

and where in the end it is even morally valid to humiliate others,

deprive them of their rights, rob, deport and finally murder them.

Thereby it is certainly a difference,

if I change to the other side of the street

when I meet a Jewish friend in order to avoid an embarrassing situation,

or move into the beautiful apartment of a Jewish family

who had earlier been forcefully expelled,

or if I order the death of a man by signing a medical form,

or whether I design the ovens of the crematorium,

or whether I as a member of one of the Reserve-Bataillons,

murder Jewish women and children.

All these are qualitatively different stages,

which vary in difficulty to cross over into the next stage.

But I fear that these are ultimately a continuum

at which the starting point is something seemingly innocuous,

and which the end point is marked by destruction.

For most people it is important only that they have managed the first steps

to enable them to step over into the last.

The perfidy, however, is that to the vast majority,

when crossing from the first stage, the last still appears quite intolerable;

while there seems to be good reason to take just the first not-so-grievous step,

this is perhaps just a little offence

against an already fragile inner conviction,

against a morally uncomfortable feeling,

but this is the moment in which the decision for inhumanity

has already been made. 

(the term ‘shifting baselines’ in social psychology describes the following phenomenon: in many people insidious changes in the social reality dislocates their perception step by step and at the same time their associated moral evaluation) 

Fortunately for me, my trip to the ER was only for anxiety.  All the symptoms disappeared when it was announced that the American people had rejected dividing us among ourselves.