SAN DIEGO, November 5, 2011—From harmless debates, to anti-Semitism, to violence in the streets, America has been on quite an adventure these past few years. Back in 2008, when Joe Biden debated Sarah Palin, he was asked about the idea of taxing people who make more than $250,000.00 a year and why that was not class warfare.
Biden said to the moderator, “Well Gwen, where I come from, it's called fairness, just simple fairness.”
I like Sarah Palin and I hate being a Monday morning quarterback, especially, years later, but, oh what fun it would have been had Palin fought back with a zinger, “Really, Joe? Well where I come from, we call that stealing!”
Words have impact, especially repeated words, unaccompanied by thought or proper definition. Since fairness has become a mantra, perhaps equal time with the word stealing is also in order.
But alas, dictionary descriptions are losing hands down.
Flash forward to 2011: Biden’s boss, otherwise known as our Candidate-In-Chief, has continued the seemingly harmless word game with galvanizing phrases such as “the rich must pay their fair share.”
This familiar, unoriginal rhetoric always sounds benign, but it contradicts sound reason, applies itself inconsistently, misrepresents our nation’s current situation, and eventually morphs into the anarchy that has become such a large part of America’s current “Occupy Wall Street” movement.
Not all of the protesters have unsympathetic concerns. There may be a certain irony in some people being filthy rich while others struggle just to make ends meet, but envy and frustration do not translate into some new moral code which allows the government, the poor, or anybody else to take something that does not belong to them.
Yes, some on Wall Street contributed to our ongoing economic melt down but so did government intrusion putting pressure on banks to give out loans to people who could not pay them back. This too, was done in the name of fairness.
In October, when asked about the Wall Street protests, President Obama said “"I understand the frustrations that are being expressed in those protests,"(ABC News, October 18).
Obama should have known better than to fan that kind of flame. It may serve to get him reelected but it does not serve the future of our country. Naturally, any country needs some kind of tax for roads, police protection, etc. Wealth redistribution is another matter. Any thinking person is aware that the pitting of rich against poor in class warfare often results in revolutions which leave freedom as a casualty in their debris. Look at history’s many communist overthrows that began with rhetoric highlighting the “haves” and the “have-nots.” In time, these noble causes created governments with little to brag about in the human rights department. They also bore an uncanny resemblance to dictatorships, regardless of the fancy political titles.
Communism isn’t the only birth child of revolutions spawned by bitter envy. Hitler also used class warfare to bring about a different form of socialism, not global (as Marx preferred), but national. It was called, National Socialism. That’s NAZI for short, kids. And who were the horrible, devil-horned rich people according to the National Socialists? Jews of course!
Yes, that was the past but it was only a matter of time before such villain casting caught up with America. Once the rich are effectively demonized, sooner or later somebody “connects the dots” equating the term rich with the term Jew.
In New York, the repetitious shout, “Jews control Wall Street” can now be heard. Not to be out done by yelling, protesters’ signs say creative things such as “Google: (1) Wall Street Jews; (2) Jewish Billionaires; (3) Jews & Fed Rsrv Bank,” and “Gaza Supports The Occupation of Wall Street,” (FRONTPAGEMAG.COM, October 26, 2011).
Didn’t you know all Jews have been rich throughout history? Well, OK, some of them have been poor. In fact, many Jews lived in European ghettos for some 2000 years, and, well, actually ghetto is a Yiddish word. OK, sure if you’re going to bring up all that! But let’s stop confusing people with facts. Just tell the masses that most Jews are billionaires trying to take over the world! Say it loud enough and often enough and people will believe it, especially people who have zero desire to take responsibility for their own shortcomings.
The fact that not all rich people are Jews and not all rich people are Republicans seems lost in translation. Actually, most American Jews are liberal Democrats anyway and many Wall Street millionaires offered hefty campaign contributions to Obama.
But then, emotionally charged movements usually produce generous examples of contradiction, leading not only to anti-Semitism but all kind of other nonsense as well.
When students in the middle of an anti-capitalism rally, take out their latest up to date I Phone to text their friends and share the euphoria, we see a contradiction. When the windows of small Mom and Pop businesses are busted to “teach Wall Street tycoons a lesson” we see a contradiction. When Michael Moore expresses solidarity with “Occupy Wall Street” by continuing to rant against capitalism, all the while being some $50 million dollars richer as a result of capitalism, we see a contradiction.
Of course Moore doesn’t view this as a contradiction at all. He justifies his position by saying:
“That even -- that even though -- that even though I do well, that I don't associate myself with those who do well, I am devoting my life to those who have less and who have been crapped upon by the system. And that's how I spend my time, my energy, my money on trying to up-end this system that I think is a system of violence, it's a system that's unfair to the average working person of this country," (CNN. Piers Morgan Tonight, October, 25, 2011).
Just in case you’re wondering, Occupy Wall Street’s “system of violence” is not the violence Moore was talking about. But then, why should he deal with more than one contradiction at a time?
To many, it sounds paranoid to assume that these protests will lead to some kind of communist or Nazi revolution. Chances are, they won’t since a good deal of our country is disgusted by what is going on. And, of course, many Wall Street occupiers are themselves denouncing the violence, anti-Semitism, etc. But destructive vandalism is not subsiding; it’s growing. This makes the more dangerous scenarios a little more likely than the early days when all we had to endure were patronizing lectures from people like good ol’ Joe.
Anarchy will continue to spread until we denounce the root problem; a manipulation of words. George Orwell predicted long ago that we would someday change our words to nullify our actions. If he turns in his grave long enough to say, “I told you so,” perhaps we will finally be ready for an intelligent dialogue. It can begin with a simple question: How did a bad sounding word like stealing get replaced by a good sounding word like fairness?
Bob Siegel is a weekend radio talk show host on KCBQ and columnist. Details of his show can be found at www.bobsiegel.net.
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