Skepticism as Opposed to Paranoia

Maintaining a healthy skepticism of government and politics is a good thing; when voters look to their political leaders and say “prove it,” it helps keeps the boys and girls honest.

But when a “healthy skepticism” morphs into outright paranoia, things can get downright ugly.

Paranoia in politics is an American political tradition going back to the founding days of the Republic.

There are the people who believe President Franklin Roosevelt knew beforehand the Japanese were going to strike Pearl Harbor in 1941 and did nothing in order to have a pretext to take America into World War II. Then there are those who believe that, 60 years later, President George W. Bush (if he didn’t, in fact, orchestrate the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks) also allowed them to take place so he could have an excuse to launch a series of wars for oil.

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And now, the paranoid among us see in President Obama’s first-day-of-school address to America’s pupils a nefarious plot to indoctrinate the nation’s schoolchildren to his Marxist way of thinking and enlist them in his struggle to change America into a model socialist state.

Please.

CSPAN will broadcast the president’s speech to America’s schoolchildren tomorrow at 1 p.m. Across the nation, public school divisions have either canceled viewings of the speech or allowed parents to opt-out their children from the “indoctrination sessions.” All because of immense pressure brought to bear from the country’s far-right wing, ginned up by the likes of Glenn Beck of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.

The man who became America’s first black president, the man who’s told the black community that it must start to own up to its problems and take responsibility for solving them ... he wants to say to the country’s millions of schoolchildren, “Welcome back, work hard, stay in school and make something of your lives.”

And this amounts to political indoctrination? Only in the alternate universe of those who think Obama’s a closet Muslim, a closet Marxist and a closet Kenyan citizen who’s plotting to bring down the United States.

Folks, the level of political discourse in this nation today is quickly deteriorating before our eyes. And reasoned political discourse is the keystone upon which the Republic is built.

Civil discourse is giving way to shouting matches between political opponents. In a civil discussion, people of differing viewpoints try to convince each other by way of facts and rational arguments calmly delivered. In shouting matches, whether on cable news channels or at the local congressman’s town hall meeting, the game plan is not to convince anyone of the rightness of your opinion but to drown out the opinions you don’t agree with.

That’s just downright un-American.