Watching the non-stop coverage of the Haiti earthquake on CNN, I had something of an epiphany. On our cable menu, CNN is channel 12 and Fox News is channel 13. I’d never noticed that before [actually, I don’t think I’ve ever watched Fox News on our television set before]. This morning, I accidentally hit the wrong channel, something I’ve done frequently over the last several days. Every time I do it, I’m jarred. On CNN. there’s Anderson Cooper or Sanjay Gupta talking about the earthquake. On Fox, there’s a story about the possible Republican victory in Massachusetts or something similar to that. On CNN, the reporters are tense from what they’re seeing. On Fox, they’re joking, laughing together, sort of flip. It’s like a window into two separate realities literally next door to each other. Fox is covering Haiti, of course. But it’s different, just different.
I have no objectivity on this topic. I think the Bush Administration
radicalized me over the last eight years. Yesterday, when Obama rolled out Clinton and Bush for the relief effort, it was the first time I’ve seen George W. Bush since he flew out of Washington this time last year. He was doing his best, I think, but I cringed when he said the thing about send "cash," not "blankets." There’s nothing wrong with what he said. It makes perfect sense. But there was that sneer on his face, the one that always lead me to change the channel during his reign. It’s the same thing I feel when
Rush Limbaugh says:
RUSH: Look, we have to understand something. The press, the State-Controlled Media, the Democrat Party politicize everything. That’s what’s so laughable about them jumping on my case for politicizing this business in Haiti. They politicize everything. And they look at everything through a political prism. Now, here’s the Media Tweak of the Day. I would like to ask Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, Rahm’s brother, if they’re planning on cost-benefit considerations for the victims of the earthquake. Remember, we’re going to have cost-benefit analysis to assign health care to people in this country, does it make sense to invest the money in their survival? Are we going to do the same thing in Haiti since we’re the lead country? Are we going to use the same principle in Haiti that we’re going to use here when Clinton and Obamacare finally sees the light of day? Are we just going to decide some people are not worth saving in Haiti? Or are we going to try to save ’em all? What are we going to do?
My epiphany? The theme in the Fox News/Rush Limbaugh/Bush Administration reality is contempt for compassion. I expect that sending cash really is better than sending blankets or personal goods. But it leaves out the motives of the senders who want to do something personally meaningful. My first impulse was to want to go down there and be a doctor. I doubt they need any 68 year old Psychiatrists right now, but I wanted to do something myself. Instead, I did what the rest of you did, sent cash. But my impulse deserves more than a sneer. The same with Rush Limbaugh’s comment. I suppose it’s a legitimate question, but that’s not why he’s bringing it up. He’s raising it as a way of mocking the compassion behind Obama’s Health Care Agenda. He might as well say, "You don’t really care about people. You just want to save money and kill off the unhelpable with your cost-benefit analysis."
My epiphany is that in that other reality, the motives in my world are seen as naive, utopian, self-serving, bleeding-heart, liberal baloney. They see us as just wanting to give away money that’s not really ours to people who won’t help themselves – lazy, ungrateful people. We’re sort of like Communists – taking from the hard-working rich to give to the no-account poor. We want to tax "them" to help "us." "Big" government is exploitive of the "haves" in the service of the "lazy have nots." In Rush’s comment, he wants us to abandon Health Care reform and keep the system we’ve got that passively excludes the "have nots," while accusing us of playing God and killing off people with cost-benefit analysis – "death panels."
It feels like we really can’t stop the blaming, attacking climate that comes from both sides of the current divide. I sometimes wonder if it’s not fueled by the communications explosion, the social networking, the blogs [like this one], jumping on stories like Rush’s pitiful comments about Haiti. Is refuting them, or decrying them, actually responsible for their spread?
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