President Obama Not Trying to Ruin This Country

Fear is powerful.

It's amazing how it can get people to do things they wouldn't ordinarily do, sometimes for the better, many times for the worse. In President Obama's first year in office fear has been ratcheted up to outlandish proportions. One might even say clownish proportions.

It is not, I repeat not, Obama's intention to ruin this country. I know, people will say it's his policies that are ruining this country, but that's not what the rhetoric has been extolling. Not agreeing with policies or methods for getting this country out of a fiscal mess or for changing health care is fine, but laying at his feet the idea he's working overtime to send this country down the toilet is nonsense.

This country has problems and Obama has been trying to solve them for only a year. His ideas may be all wrong or poorly planned out but they aren't an attempt to turn us into Soviet state. Fear mongering gets us nowhere. Substituting fear for logical discourse causes us to fly off in so many directions, many of them unhealthy, that nothing can get done.

This isn't new in history. People substitute fear for things that aren't understand or to attain desired ends. But fear is destructive. When Galileo and Copernicus reintroduced the idea that the sun was the center of the solar system fear took over in many circles. Suddenly they were out to destroy the Church and our comfortable sense of our place in the universe. Actually, Galileo and Copernicus saw observations that didn't add up and showed a new way of thinking that cleared things up. Fear is easy, looking at the facts a lot harder.

When we show Obama as Hitler and call him a socialist, we're not even being logical mixing up two different philosophies. When you misuse swastikas and Hitler mustaches you diminish their impact for those times when they truly fit. An anything goes attitude may seem like an easy way to win but all it does is weaken the fabric of argument, even of society. Winning isn't everything. Building is. Obama is not a Nazi, he's not Stalin, or Rasputin, Pol Pot, or Mao.

He's a president elected to get something done. You don't like the way he's going about it, march against it, write op-eds, send letters, make all the noise you want. That's healthy. Just realize that venomous, illogical attacks in a time of crisis such as we're in can have a lasting effect. Like a poison in the system, it can continue eating away at society through mistrust, hatred, and poorly enacted solutions.

I actually don't feel Obama or the Democrats have handled many things very well, but that doesn't mean it's all a plot to bring down America. Republicans have done their bit, too, enabling a feeding frenzy of crazy ideas (death panels) and by simply stepping out of the process. When you're in two wars and talk about destroying a presidency (DeMint) you can only leave this country weak. Constantly saying nothing we're doing is right (without always backing it up), that the government is our enemy, that all is lost if we don't follow one group's ideas is demagoguery. And you can be sure it certainly lowers confidence.

I'm afraid we have a deep valley to get through before this country begins to climb to a higher state of governance. People speaking up is a good thing because there's a lot to speak up against. But speak up constructively. Don't let fear and its symbols be the language we use to get better.