Martin Luther King Would Have Loved the Teabaggers, Not Called Them Racists

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.truthout.org/100409B

Friday 02 October 2009

by: Mike Elk, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

A few weeks ago, I attended the teabagger protests in DC. The thing I noticed the most about the folks there was that, for the most part, they were friendly, nice, hardworking people. Sure, there were some crazies; sure, there were some racists. For the most part, though, they looked like the type of folks I grew up with in the labor movement, coming to DC to enjoy a protest and spend the rest of the weekend taking in some monuments and museums. These weren't rich suburbanites; the teabaggers I saw were mainly poor people, whose trip to DC were probably the only the vacation they would be able to afford this year.


While we may not agree with the teabaggers, they are not all crazy. (Photo: ajagendorf25 / flickr)

Growing up in Pittsburgh, I had known many poor white people, but they all seemed to vote for Democrats because they had manufacturing jobs and were union members. Gradually, though, the unions - which were a means of educating people about politics - evaporated under the anti-union policies of Democrats and Republicans alike. I saw more and more strong Democrats turn Republican as they began to distrust a Democratic Party that took away their jobs with policies like NAFTA and one after another massive corporate giveaway.

Even recently, my own grandmother, a lifelong Democrat, admitted to my mother that she was unsure about health care reform because of the "death panels."

Is my grandmother some sort of stupid, racist, teabagging reactionary? I think not. This is the woman who, after all, told me stories about how she was called a “Mediterranean n**ger” growing up and was sympathetic to the experience of African-Americans. But has my grandmother been lied to by Democrats and Republicans alike and seen her standard of living decline over the past 30 years? Sure. And has this led my grandmother to the point where she is so confused about what to believe that she simply doesn't trust government because, mostly, what government has done is hurt her over the last 30 years? Without a doubt.

As Sara Robinson argues in her must-read piece analyzing the rise of the teabagger movement among working-class Americans:

No democracy in history has ever survived with our current levels of inequality. There's no reason for the middle and working classes to trust anything about a system that's so clearly rigged to suck money straight out of their pockets into the tax-free offshore bank accounts of the wealthy - who, of course, turn right around and use that money to buy off our government, so they can suck up even more of our economy for themselves.

People are confused. They are angry, and they have little faith in government.

FULL story at link.