The things they say about Barack Obama are so out of this world, they make me feel like an alien in my own country
There are days when I am certain that I am living in a variation of that old Twilight Zone episode “The Eye of the Beholder.” You remember that one, I’m sure, if you are of a certain age. It’s the episode where a woman named Janet Tyler has her face completely bandaged, having gone through multiple surgeries to get her to look “normal”. In my version of this episode, I am Mrs. Tyler, only I am waiting patiently for half of America to recover from its blinkered view of Barack Obama.
The recovery I hope for is about how ‘they’ perceive a man who stands out as a good and decent person. What they see is as alien to me as the wide-eyed green aliens from Roswell. What they see is:
- An America-hating, non-American.
- A socialist.
- A man weak in foreign affairs because he avoids war at all costs.
- A man who is coming to take your guns.
- A Muslim, not a Christian
- A black man, not a human being
- An unpatriotic man for saying the U.S. constitution is “fundamentally flawed.”
I’m not saying he’s perfect, nobody is. But if you don’t credit Barack Obama, at least in part if not in great measure, for saving our economy and preventing a second Great Depression and securing the American way of life in so doing, then you are one of them. If you say that bringing health care to millions of Americans was not the right thing to do, then you are one of them. If you cannot grasp that bailing out the auto industry didn’t help kick-start the recovery, you are one of them. So on and so forth.
In the Twilight Zone episode, Janet Tyler pleads for the doctors to remove her bandages in order to see if the last treatment is a success. Throughout the episode we only see the doctors and nurses in shadow, or only hear their compassionate voices. They do as she wishes. She is devastated to find that the procedure did not work: her face remains the same, that of a beautiful woman. The society she so desperately hoped to join is the one with the hideous-looking faces. It is not an exaggeration that this is how I see so many of my fellow citizens on the right or of a Republican ilk. The ugly that they see is so removed from my own personal observations.
In the end, Janet Tyler is ‘saved’ by another of her ‘kind’, and removed to live with other outcasts of society.
I am Janet Tyler. I wonder how this American would like Vancouver?
You nailed it on the fugly head Denise. You quickly summarized thee whole sordid mess America + dare I say the rest o the world finds itself in. The commenter above clanton1934Ch rightly points out that instead of finding solutions to the myriad of problemos we face, we bicker. It’s sad n pathetic! 😉
Our neighbors of the political Right, instead of objectively identifying problems and cooperatively searching for pragmatic solutions, they START with their preconceived “one size fits all” solutions, knowing it is right because it fits their faith and beliefs. Yielding to something else is a sin. To defend thei “correct” position, one throws whatever rocks they can find at anyone who doesn’t comply.