In watching the CNN-Tea Party debate in Tampa, Florida, last night, beyond the points made by the potential GOP Presidential candidates, one characteristic stood out, a very ugly characteristic!
The audience at the debate demonstrated just how nasty, mean spirited, self centered, and lacking in humanity the Tea Party crowd have become!
It has become a disease in America, if one wants to believe that the Tea Party movement is spreading far and wide, which the author hopes is NOT the case!
Witness the following:
1. When Rick Perry brought up the idea of Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke being treasonous, the crowd cheered wildly.
2. When the subject of a 30 year old male who chose not to have health insurance coverage and then is in the hospital for six months, the reaction of the audience is to applaud the idea that he should not be put into intensive care to save his life, that he should die, that there is no responsibility for others in medical crisis.
3. The hatred of the audience toward illegal immigration, and readiness to destroy Social Security and Medicare was obvious.
4. The refusal of the audience to consider that Ron Paul had some good points about our foreign policy causing a lot of our woes financially, and instead booing him, was disturbing.
5. There were many other moments of poor behavior by the crowd, too numerous to list here.
But beyond all this, the fact that the audience at the Reagan Library debate last week cheered and applauded the fact that Rick Perry had been responsible for the execution of more prisoners than any governor in history, was also very disconcerting, as if the death penalty is the answer, when it is well known that mistakes ARE made and have been made in Texas and elsewhere, with denial of new evidence, refusal to recognize that some testimony against some defendants is unreliable, and that the death penalty is unevenly utilized against minorities as compared to whites!
If this is the country we are becoming, the equivalent of the Tea Party mentality, this nation is in deep trouble, and we have lost our common decency and humanity!
But the thought is that this is a minority view, which demands full commitment to fight and defeat this poison, this cancer, in our society, before it becomes endemic!