Letter: Fear and hatred are destroying the U.S.

To the community,

Fear and hate defines the political age we live in; an age of attempts to manipulate the mass of citizens to fear and hate the target of the manipulators by any means necessary. Distortions, lies, whatever works.

Bill Crawford

An example is the campaign to disarm the president of the United States. For openers, he isn’t a citizen. Though disproven time and time again, the birthers keep that iron in the fire. Regardless of the merits or lack of merits, the president supports a national health program. Therefore, he is a socialist. Those who make the charge never bother to define the word socialist. But everyone knows it’s bad. And he’s not a Christian. He’s a Moslem. Has to be because his father was a black man from East Africa. So now the haters impose a religious test to hold public office. And the president is black (half). And for some citizens black men are feared. Therefore hated.

So with the above hit list some Americans are willing to bring down the federal government because the government is corrupted by the twice elected president who in the eyes of many is opposite of what America stands for. Home of the free and the brave have been lost, so they say. Texas is American and Washington, D.C., is a foreign place, un-American full of strange hateful thoughts and ideas about civil liberties, voter rights, and social legislation to bring abut basic equality for all citizens. The manipulators are bent on destroying the Four Freedoms, the New Deal, anything that messes with their desire to have power.

We should be careful about what we wish for. For example, Nazi Germany. Many Germans “were drawn to one of the most poisonous myths to take root in defeated Germany, the so-called stab-in-the-back conspiracy. According to this myth, Germany hadn’t lost the war on the battlefield, but rather had been betrayed form within. Chief among these internal traitors were Germany’s liberal political parties….” (This is from Scott Anderson’s “Lawrence in Arabia”.)

From the destruction of the Weimar Republic came Hitler and the goosestep and World War II. Time flies, sometimes backward.

Bill Crawford, South Lake Tahoe