Stuck in a Room with Mitt Romney
Paul Constant (TheStranger.com): What It’s Like to Be Trapped with 50,000 Republicans at the RNC…. the messaging sounded inoffensive, but when you really think about what is being said at this convention, you realize that all the red, white, and blue bunting and clothing and video imagery is a put-on. All the talk about patriotism, about supporting the troops, is just lip service. This is the most unpatriotic crowd I have ever been a part of. What they are against is community. Every sentence is devoid of empathy. Every finger-wag is aimed directly at an American who can’t afford health insurance, who hasn’t had a raise on their minimum-wage job in four years. Even as they rail against a statement that the president never really made, they are talking about tearing America down and leaving something meaner and greedier in its place. They’re radicals – radicals who’ve gone over the edge and are trying to make their radicalism mainstream.
…..They’re scared of the imaginary world of the 1950s in their heads dying forever, and the problem is that scared people make dumb choices …. It always comes back to fear. Fear is the single greatest enemy of survival. When you’re afraid, you can’t think ahead, you can’t plan…..
But when you choose to live your life in fear, you lose that most essential thing that makes you human. When you support George W. Bush’s Patriot Act, as the woman to my left with the cowboy hat full of Bush/Cheney buttons probably did, you’re supporting fear. When you try to take food away from starving people, or deny good students access to higher education, or steal choices away from the next generation of women, you may not be a monster, but you are making monstrous choices....
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/stuck-in-a-room-with-mitt-romney/Content?oid=14623016
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