The furor over the Susan Komen situation has gotten a lot of people upset and has raised a lot of questions. It got me thinking of the ACORN fiasco a few years ago.
Recall that ACORN then, like Planned Parenthood now, had, for reasons having no rational basis, become the whipping boy for the right wing. Most of the ills of society, it seemed, could be traced to the pernicious folks at ACORN, people (like Saul Alinsky) most of us had never heard of before.
When James O’Keefe put out his lying video, Congress voted en masse, Republicans and Democrats, to defund ACORN, sans hearings, sans proof, sans everything. There was no public outcry; no letters from Senators; no Mayor Bloomberg coming to the rescue; no mass revulsion on social media.
ACORN was not the first organization destroyed by the right and it won’t be the last. Only a few weeks ago we saw major American corporations backing off from sponsoring a show about American Muslims because one right winger was upset.
I’d like to think that something has snapped in the American psyche, that we’ve had a collective gag reflex and we’re simply not going to take it anymore. A sliver of our society has been calling the shots. Every time we try to placate them, they simply demand more. Maybe with the attack on Planned Parenthood, and the transparent lies the Komen folks have been telling about the decision, they have finally jumped the shark.
On the other hand, maybe all the furor is because the right made the mistake of using what had been considered an upstanding non-political institution to attack what most people perceive as a middle class institution. Perhaps if the attack was on another ACORN, the type of organization mostly serving the poor and the not-white, there would have been another collective yawn, and while the Democrats might not have joined in, like they did with ACORN, they would also not have done much to push back.
But, despite what some people I know might say, I am at heart an optimist. I think this is a collective retching by the American people. We’re sick of being ruled by the oligarchs, and we’re sick of having our personal lives policed by a bunch of right wing hypocrites. In short, we’re not going to take it.
And that brings us to our Friday Night Music selection, in line with the new policy that the selected song will have some connection, no matter how remote, to the events of the week. To be honest, at first I was going to go with the Who, but I actually think the lyrics of this song by this very silly band are more apropos.
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