AMERICANS BEHAVING BADLY -- BECAUSE THEY CAN

We’ve seen some really bad behavior lately among Americans in town hall meetings. Ostensibly, the conflict among Americans right now is the future of healthcare in America. These very public displays of anger and frustration could just be born of something much more than the current healthcare debate. Something tells me people would not be carrying signs with swastikas on them, and defacing pictures of President Obama to make him look like Hitler, if something deeper wasn’t happening here.

For eight years, under George W. Bush, the nation was highly repressed. The Bush White House was inarguably one of the cagiest, most secretive administrations in recent history. Americans shed themselves of what little trust they had left in government. The trust erosion really began with the Nixon administration. People in my generation watched the whole Watergate debacle at the tail end of the Vietnam era. We saw how truly untrustworthy government can be. To many of us in this age bracket (50s), every President we have had since then has been a letdown. That means that a new President has to not only live up to our expectations, but he has to prove that he’s got the stuff with which to do it.

Along comes Barack Obama, who still seems to be a really decent guy. But he showed up as economic prosperity was in the past. Every time a recession happens, there is a substantial part of the population that circles the conservative wagons in a defensive posture. That’s what Obama walked into – a tightly closed set of American conservatives. This is not a political statement. It is, rather, simple observation of what has happened since last November. A black, liberal President walked through the gates of a racially skeptical electorate, at a time when public dissatisfaction with the Presidency was at its absolute hottest.

So, when I see people blatantly strapping guns onto their backs outside of a hall where the President is scheduled to speak, that’s not about healthcare. It’s about anger. It is about stretching the First Amendment beyond its borders. When I watch a woman repeatedly yell, “Heil Hitler” to a Jewish guy at a Town hall meeting, it is not just about about healthcare. It is absolutely about exasperation and disgust with government. I believe the natives are restless – so restless that they are turning on each other. Americans and their legislators are facing off in public, and it’s not pretty. Both are conducting themselves in ways they would never have pictured themselves behaving. On television. Watch:


Yes, healthcare is a critical issue, and yes it is the catalyst for all the yelling and acting out we are witnessing in these town hall showdowns. But healthcare is simply the soapbox. Those who are aggressively acting up -- armed with megaphones and decades-old frustration, jobless and frightened—those people are not just there to protest potential health insurance laws. They are there to say that enough is enough. The people in this country were marginalized for eight years, while despotic and ill-equipped leaders guided us into failed banks, corporate chaos, the highest unemployment rate in 26 years, and an international reputation best described as global disdain. America is damned mad. And it is speaking up in record numbers and in ways it hasn’t allowed itself to be heard since Vietnam.

I’m with Barney Frank. Indeed what is unfolding here is a true testament to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I would like to see the loudest among the protesters get their point across without being so disrespectful toward their opponents. Honestly, I’d like to see a little more decorum here. Sometimes it is easier to hear what someone is trying to say when they stop screaming, brandishing semi-automatic weapons and comparing our nation to Nazi Germany. Still, I support their right to do it. Here’s why: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” That is the entire First Amendement text. Read it again. Haven’t we lost enough freedoms in this country already? We can’t risk losing this one. If only I were able to be as eloquent about this as these guys:

WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT "IVAN THE TERRIBLE?"

It is difficult to say what caught up with John Demjanjuk first – the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service or karma. But a few days ago, agents from the former knocked on the door of the modest Cleveland, OH home he has inhabited for over half a century, and physically carried him out in a wheelchair, for deportation to Germany. There he would stand charges for the execution of more than 29,000 Jews and others in Nazi death camps during World War II. Long thought to be Ivan the Terrible, Demjanjuk has been fighting for his life for three decades, all the while denying his identity. Even with overwhelming evidence that he is indeed a mass murderer, at the eleventh hour a U.S. court issued of stay and Demjanjuk was returned to his tiny Cleveland bungalow.

At 89, Demjanjuk reportedly suffers from kidney disease, a form of leukemia, gout, and spinal problems. He is said to be in constant pain, and his family contends the trip to Germany would kill him. So what do we do with this man who is most likely responsible for the extermination of men, women, children and the elderly, and who fled his country, dropped the “Ivan” from his birth name to become “John,” and lived out his days in the middle of middle America? Do we simply forgive him his trespasses and let the world move on, or should he be held accountable for the atrocities?

Demjanjuk was sentenced to death in 1988 by the Israeli justice system. That sentence was later reversed when the courts decided there was reasonable doubt about his identity. He was stripped of his U.S. citizenship, but then regained his American passport in 1998. In 2002, his U.S. citizenship was again revoked amidst charges that he served as a guard at Sobibor and Majdanek camps in occupied Poland, and at the Flossenbürg camp in Germany. In 2005, a deportation order was issued, and finally, just days ago it appeared he would indeed face the German tribunal. As of this writing, no final decision has been made public about Demjanjuk’s deportation.

We are left with these questions: Is it sheer coincidence that Demjanjuk bears striking resemblance to Ivan the Terrible? Is it also a coincidence that Demjanjuk’s job at Sobibor was reportedly to run the diesel engines that fueled the gas chambers, and then in Cleveland he worked as a diesel mechanic? Multiple survivors of German concentration camps have identified Demjanjuk as a guard in camps where they were imprisoned. Do we ignore their testimony, thereby discrediting their memories? Demjanjuk has lived in the U.S. since 1952. Had the INS initially known he had been a guard in Nazi death camps, he would not have been granted citizenship in the U.S. Does his age and infirmity now disqualify him from deportation on charges that he falsified his original application for citizenship?

The pending, potential prosecution and punishment of John Demjanjuk is now about humanity. His alleged victims and the survivors of the death camps would say he sacrificed his own humanity the moment he participated in the first of many executions. Others would say his inhumanity is not reason enough for ours, and that if he is prosecuted at this late date and imprisoned
or put to death, we have sacrificed our own humanity. We know of no international statute of limitations on prosecution for murder, but we do know that human beings of advanced age with severe health problems are often approached in an Egalitarian fashion, one in which we protect the weakest members of our society. Still, Demjanjuk failed to act to protect the weakest members of his society when he was a young man, if the accusations are accurate.

John Demjanjuk forces each of us to confront our own views on respect for human life. John Demjanjuk may just be the greatest ethical dilemma any of us have ever confronted.