COGNITIVE DISCONNECT

Remember Timothy McVeigh? You know... the guy who blew the front off the Murray Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995? Remember? He’s the guy who got really confused about his anger at government and his patriotism. He obviously didn’t know the difference... and the consequence of his confusion was disastrous for the nation... catastrophic for the one-hundred-sixty-eight people he killed and the eight-hundred he wounded in what he believed was an act of patriotism.

Tim McVeigh’s cognitive disconnect is not unusual. We sometimes see it in our neighbors and relatives, and I confess that at times catch a glimpse of it in myself. As a retired person who no longer goes out to work every morning, I have more time to think about what I believe and why I believe it. Some other people who do a lot of talking for a living apparently don’t have enough time to think about what they are saying before they say it. My guess is that Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, and Sarah Palin do know that hating a country’s government is not a patriotic response. They are making too much money and enjoying their celebrity too much to give up their media roles out of any fear they may inspire domestic terrorists to do what Timothy McVeigh did. I am also guessing that their faithful followers are most often people who are satisfied to have others do their critical thinking for them. When I was doing my work as a teacher, I was constantly reminded that in any group of people there are several, sometimes many, who would rather have someone tell them the answers, what to believe, without having to bother with the “whys” and “therefores.” Among the Tea Party and Open Carry folks are obviously some genuinely patriotic folks, but just as obviously there are among them some seriously disturbed citizens who are pathologically damaged to the extent that they could be inspired by the steady streams of vitriolic rhetoric coming out of media sources like Fox News to repeat the kind of thing McVeigh did.

A good, if disturbing, example of cognitive disconnect is the ease with which some people view as heroic the putatively conservative president George W. Bush, whose administration expanded federal government and federal entitlement programs and who, with his vice-president and secretary of defense began a costly war of choice based on unfounded rumors, and turned a comfortable surplus handed down by the previous administration into alarming deficit almost overnight. (That last sentence is overly long, but because I am a retired guy who can do just about anything legal that he wants to do, I’m going to leave it.) Limbaugh, Beck, Coulter, and Palin (Well, maybe she really doesn’t know.) are aware that many of their fans are folks living in disconnected fear of and longing for an apocalypse. Look at the causes that frighten and excite them, and listen to the rhetoric: global warming (What global warming?)... equal rights for GLBT folks (reprobates and willful sinners)... illegal immigration (giving a break to people who are not like “us” who sneak into our good country to get something we have worked for that they want for nothing)... white supremacists (God made US not them in HIS image)... conspiracy theorists (Somebody out there somewhere is out to get us) and militia enthusiasts (I can’t begin even to guess why anybody past the age of fourteen would want to carry empty (?) guns or to wear gunless holsters).

The United States of America is a realized, beautiful idea, not just a hypothetical dream. It could be spoiled by the very people who claim to love it. This morning I went down to a trolley station behind a small shopping area called, of all things, The Hazard Center; and as I waited for my train, I looked at that tiny piece of America and wondered how it would change if the right wing spoilers could have their way with the country. Would our country become a real hazard center if the people who insist that they should be allowed to carry guns openly in America could actually do it? Last week a rather large contingent of "open carry" people walked along a boardwalk at the beach not far from here and people were alarmed to see eighty men and women walking together carrying weapons.

The flag that I can see from my hill flies briskly above the Hazard Center; beautiful flowers bloom all around it; a lazy river runs through the valley behind the center; peaceful people come and go on the trolley; things look good in the America that I see every day.