At the end of my day yesterday, I turned on the old Boob Tube to relax. I happened upon one of my favorite movies — you know, the ones you’ve seen countless times but just love it anyway. I count among them Top Gun, Field of Dreams and Remember the Titans.
If you haven’t seen the latter, it was based on a true story about TC Williams High School in Virginia which had been desegregated in 1971. An African American Coach, played by Denzel Washington, is hired to lead the football team, ousting the current football coach who was white.
The white players threaten to boycott the team if Coach Yost, the white coach, won’t become assistant coach. There is division until the boys go to training camp. There they come together, realizing they are a team of football players, not a team of white and black.
Then they return home. And this is where Life imitates the Movies, in my mind.
The town is divided. The white parents won’t speak with the parents of the black players. There are protesters at the school waving signs of hatred and division. The coach is told that if he loses a single game, he will be fired. The officials try to throw one of the games. A brick is thrown through the coach’s window. The black players are thrown out of a white club in town because while it was empty, it was “full.”
It was at the point, when the players returned home from camp, that I started to see the eerie parallels between this time back then and our own now.
I invite you to watch the movie and simply substitute “black and white” for “blue and red”, the colors of our beliefs today, conservative and liberal.
We have returned to that same period of time, I think. We no longer openly hate a minority (it’s not politically correct), but we openly hate those who have a different opinion than ours. We openly call them names on television during campaigns and during so called “talk shows” on Fox, CNBC, CNN, etc. where pundits who have an agenda but hide behind the fact that they are so-called journalists, twist words, report obvious falsehoods, fuel unrest and question our patriotism if we don’t submit without question to their view of the world.
In a true democracy, neither the right or the left is correct in their views. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, where the two sides come together to compromise on a vision of what this country should be. I for one don’t want to live in a country that is only one party or the other. They call that a dictatorship.
Yet there are those in politics and in the media who want us to have that type of government. They want their view and their view alone. And rather than convince us that their viewpoint really is the right one by sharing with us their ideas and their reasoning, they immediately sink into the gutter, deriding the other side’s position, discounting the studies of the neutral organizations that have nothing to gain either way, try to convince us that the very sky will come crashing down and the seas will part if we don’t believe their vision of our country.
That, my friends, is a road none of us should want to go down. In history, it’s happened before. It’s happened in the lifetime of many of us, in fact. Germany was pretty good at this kind of propaganda. The “Big Lie” it was known as. It was the belief that if you tell a lie long enough and loud enough, people will believe you.
The voices are louder than ever right now. They tell us that this most recent act of violence against innocents was not about politics. That it wasn’t fueled by the never ending cacophony of hate and division that tells us to get rid of the opposition by any means necessary. They want us to believe that they (the politicians and media) had nothing to do with the situation. They willingly wash their hands while greedily laughing behind our backs with their colleagues because we bought another one of their big lies.
The weakminded in this country always will. They are only too willing to goose-step in line with one side or the other, even though the very foundation of a democracy demands open discussion and compromise, not submission and ridicule. Unfortunately, none of our leaders, and certainly none of the media, are listening to us. They stopped listening to one another long ago, and now they are not listening to us. I only wonder what comes next.
I am reminded of a quote by Pastor Martin Niemoller, who followed the rise of Nazi Germany and said:
They came first for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up.
Will you? Will we?
On the road in Florida,
Robb
PS: Before anyone goes postal on me, I did not mean to infer that we were on our way to becoming like the Nazis. I am simply using a well known history lesson to remind us of the power of persuasion and the supression of alternate viewpoints and derision of those who are different from us.