Bush Administration: Anti-American

It happened just as the Republican Wrong threatened.

The hand-selected committee voted to cut funding for PBS. Now it goes to Congress and the vote is likely by Wednesday - just one weekend and two working days away.

It will take every American who cares about the future of America to turn this around and I'm talking every American who isn't afraid of Big Bird and all he represents.

I'm talking e-mails and phone calls out the yin yang.

I'm talking sacks of letters being dumped on our nation's capital that makes that scene in Miracle on 34th Street - where bags and bags of letters addressed to Santa Clause (who's on trial for claiming to be Santa Claus) - look like child's play.

Without public outcry in a big way, this Republican Congress will get in lock step and defund PBS not partially, but completely.

It's all part of a crack down on creativity and education.

Why, you might ask. Why hate educational TV? Why try to kill all the beauty and creativity and information PBS provides?

Why? Because people watch it. And because people watch it, it's dangerous to the goals of this Administration.

When people are educated and allowed to blossom, there is diversity and they tend to form independent opinions based on a variety of sources. They also tend to figure out what makes them happy and they do it.

Subsequently, educated and creative people don't tend to go for things that kill them off like unnecessary wars and more mercury in the water.

For two centuries America invited the most diverse and creative people on this planet to her shores. America attracted and gave birth to people who won Nobel prizes, found cures, created new technologies and pioneered new art forms.

America was an exciting place where people like Andrew Carnegie, Albert Einstein, Bob Hope (yes our icon was British) - came, pursued their dreams and gave us incredible gifts.

But diversity of all types frightens the people in power now. They want to contain it, control it, destroy it if they can. They want one way of thinking only.

My theory is that they are afraid of their own inner demons so they are targeting everyone else as containing them.

If they accept the well-supported theory that homosexuality isn't a choice - and if they bothered to read up on how many people are born with gender identity issues - they might realize their anti-gay stance just isn't realistic.

It's hard to believe that here we are in the 21st century with crises snapping at us like alligators in a swamp and all these folks care about is what kind of genitalia your lover has.

You know, I wonder if maybe these guys have never really been all that attracted to their wives.

Maybe the whole "gay issue" really pisses them off because it looks like gay people have better relationships than they do.

Or it could be deeper than that - as it so often is - when people demonize others.

What if, secretly, their own sexual feelings give them thoughts like:

"Ohmygod--whatifi'mgay?"

What better cover is there for self-doubt? It's been done so often it's a cliche.

Of course they wouldn't want to acknowledge anything of the sort. So what better distraction from questions about their own sexuality than to attack the people whom they fear might, one day, claim them as their own?

J. Edgar Hoover did it. In public he was rabidly anti-homosexual, but in private he was a cross dresser, among other things.

The real irony is that homosexuality isn't barred in the Bible. Go look.

But even if it had been - like all those dietary laws that were so necessary to save lives until pasteurization and modern sanitation made them irrelevant - it would have been an edict of practicality - to encourage a population with high infant mortality rates to have sex that produced children - and enough children to survive.

You know, it used to be a mortal sin, if you were Catholic, to eat meat on Friday. Then the church realized it was a silly thing - although with the mercury levels in fish these days it could be deadly to require the eating of fish - and announced that people could eat meat on Fridays...after all.

Oops. All those people who died thinking they were going to hell...

Truth is, it never was a mortal sin. The early church just made it a mortal sin because the local fishermen needed more business.

Scratch the surface and pretty much everything labeled as "sinful" - that doesn't hurt anyone else - started with a secular opinion and some more or less practical motivation behind it.

So I'm thinking about a hundred years from now - if global warming hasn't washed us off the planet by then - there will be another "Sorry folks we just made it up" about homosexuality being a sin.

In fact, wouldn't it be ironic - when our population is through the roof and starvation is imminent - if homosexuals become highly respected for not contributing to the problem?

But I digress.

In The Flight of the Creative Class, Richard Florida makes a compelling case about how intolerant thinking has created an educational crisis in this country and is following that up with a brain and creativity drain.

Astoundingly, although America became great as a result of tolerance, education and creativity, about 200 people currently in power are working overtime to gut our freedoms, convince us tolerance is a dirty word and turn us against education with the result that only the wealthy will be able to afford it.

Of course, with this agenda, PBS and NPR must go.

One problem - their stance sounds Anti-American to me.

And I wonder - really - why do they hate this country - and our institutions - so much?

Why do they hate the land and her laws that gave them such opportunity? They got so rich off her and now they are among the most powerful people in the world. Why hate the idea of "a chicken in every pot?" And why bite the hand that feeds you?

Why steal our retirements, kill Medicaid, ship jobs overseas and gut unions so we can't earn enough to eat?

Why deform tort law so corporations are unaccountable for injury from their products, pollution or deceptions (like Enron)?

Why use the Every Child Left Behind bill to completely defund our public schools?

Why change 90% of all regulations increasing the amount of lead, mercury and other pollutants dumped in our soil, water and air and then pass the No Tree Left Behind bill allowing corporations to clear cut old growth in our national forests?

Why lie about WMD's to get us in a war where over 1700 of our brothers and sisters have been killed and over 41,000 - that's forty-one thousand - of them have come home from Iraq with missing limbs, horrible scarring and psychological damage from the trauma they experienced?

Why turn the opportunity to pay down our national debt into the biggest deficit America has ever had so that the value of our currency is in jeopardy and our way of life increasingly threatened by financial instability?

Why push to destroy our wilderness refuges and pristine beaches for a few months worth of oil instead of urging conservation and developing a long term renewable energy program?

Why pit groups of people against each other instead of uniting us after 9/11?

Why?

And for heavens sake, why do they hate Big Bird and want to take him away from us?

Maybe because he's taller.

Must be a power thing.