Have you seen this yet: “Spitting and Slurs Directed at Lawmakers?”
Tea Party protesers apparently spit on House of Representative members, yelled gay slurs at Barney Frank and the “N-word” at African-American members.
That’s it. The Tea Party has jumped the shark. Everyone out of the pool.
Now, I don’t side with the demonstrators – I’d very much like government health care, please – but I think it’s fair that they’re allowed to display their opinion. Everyone should be allowed to assemble peaceably.
But racial epithets slung towards John Lewis?
That gets my ire up. My blood boiling.
Although he does it so often it’s a bit like crying wolf, this deserves a Keith Olbermann rant.
So I’ll take a shot.
John Lewis is, well if not a “hero” then he’s certainly “heroic”. He’s faced the darkest, most evil aspect of America, risen up and changed the system.
John Lewis is, by my account, the living embodiment of the possibility of America.
Here he is after being attacked by white segregationists at a bus station in Montgomery, Alabama during the Freedom Rides:
The caption that I cut off? “Jim Zwerg [the white Freedom Rider on the right] is checking how many teeth he has left.”
Here’s Lewis, as the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, being beaten by state trooper during an attempt to march on the Alabama state capitol in March of 1965:
I don’t even have a photo from his beating during the Selma to Montgomery marches, which left head wounds that are still visible 45 years later.
The Tea Party crowd, and before them the Militia-folk of the 1990s, like the Thomas Jefferson quote “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants”.
John Lewis, patriot, has shed his blood for our country.
Our country.
Part of the reason that protestors today are not mercilessly beaten is the lessons we as a country learned after the Civil Rights movement. The photos of dogs, water hoses and billy clubs being used on human beings as they tried to exercise their right to peaceably assemble were so violent, so excessive that it sickens us still a half a century later.
Disagree with his politics, that’s fine. Assemble in peaceful manner to do so. Heck, go on Fox News and complain. But don’t do this.
