The pettiness, dishonesty and just plain mean spiritness on display in America today is very one sided. The Republican horde lost the election. Its favorite propaganda purveyor is in a precipitous ratings decline. It failed at legislating women's reproductive rights. Homophobia was not validated with a national referendum. America no longer will sit by helplessly while unstable paranoiacs flop their weapons around like bad porn stars and racism was not accepted as a natural consequence of the decline of white hegemony.
Republicans are pissed and they are really, really pissed because they had God on their side and they still lost. It appears, in their minds, that evil has won out and the correct response to this is to strip completely naked and expose themselves in all their furious, paranoid, reactionary, anachronistic, non-spiritual glory. The God they thought they had on their side is an old God. He is a petty, vengeful Old Testament God. They are still clamoring for the Angry Gods that Jesus came to extinguish and supplant. If one is so inclined one could say that they lost because they denied their Christ. He preached inclusion and love and forgiveness and freedom from fear and they spent millions on disseminating messages bound absolutely to fear and loathing of ideas and individuals they arbitrarily chose as dangerous and inimical to "Christian", "Republican Conservative" government and life.
Watching what passes for acceptable and harmless posting on Facebook is what prompted me to write this piece. There is a baseness and ugliness that has insinuated itself into the dialogue since the election and the vast majority of this stuff is posted by Republicans, and, what is even more unsettling -- they are young Republicans. Scouring the Internet for stories that validate their fear and anger, they are, probably unwittingly, exposing their hysterical contempt for common humanity and their place in the brotherhood of all men.
To my thinking, the tragedy of 9/11 and the wrong-headed response of the Bush administration is probably the single most significant recent event that has prompted the cultural roughness in America today. We as a nation embraced the choices of or sat by as our leaders chose to deny the teachings of Jesus, the Buddha and the other inward looking, comprehensive spiritual disciplines. We as a nation took the path of the old Gods and as a result Osama Bin Laden may never really die. His spirit is very much alive on Facebook.
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