Anger

I have been trying to find the root of the anger and passion that the Health Care bill has managed to generate. I am not talking about normal discourse, debate and disagreement Rather I am referring to the unbridled horrific anger and passion that has been causing certain individuals and groups to threaten violence and assassinations. I was close to reaching a conclusion. However a Jerome Miller has beaten me to the punch. Here is quote from Mr. Miller. The full comment can be found at http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.reason21sep21,0,5381115.story

“…If Mr. Obama has become the focus of rage and fear, it is because he has come to symbolize what deeply angers and frightens many Americans: the complexities that make us feel impotent, the profound changes that are altering our world. It is hard, for example, for many of us to imagine a world in which white is not the dominant color and Christianity is just one of many respected creeds. The anger and fear that such change provokes are understandable. This does not make them any less irrational.

There is little that the president or his administration can do to allay this irrationality. Those who respond to him with visceral anger and fear are right to see him as the embodiment of the changes that enrage and terrify them. As he is the agent of change, he can do little to disarm the irrational response it often provokes. What is missing from our present political culture is an opposition that responds to the president's history-making administration with thoughtful conversation, an opposition that has the courage to eschew and explicitly criticize the rhetoric of hate and oversimplification.

Only conservatives and Republicans can provide such an opposition. The need for it is fast becoming desperate. For the vacuum created by the absence of such an opposition will not continue for long. There is a maelstrom waiting to fill it.

Astute Republican thinkers such as The New York Times' David Brooks have emphasized that the party needs to rethink itself to renew its identity. But there is already available to the Republican Party and the conservative movement an indispensable role in these historic times: They can stand up for reason and work to delegitimize the demagogy and malice that are betraying their deeply thoughtful and venerable traditions. Doing so may cost them votes; it may cost them primary elections. But it will earn them the gratitude of history.

We now need, perhaps more urgently than ever before, an opposition that is loyal, above all, to reason, as it was exercised by our founders.

Jerome Miller is professor emeritus of philosophy at Salisbury University. His e-mail is jamiller@salisbury.edu.
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