Any idea how long that America will regress from the fear state policies back into normality?

An old dude who lived during WWII in DC told me that even then it didn't get this bad.

Eventually, we need to tamp down the fear, don't you think?

It isn't the first time today I've written how we're no longer circling the drain and we're now completly down the drain.

And it is the fault of the lunatics in this country and those in power who whip up the crazies for political and economical reasons. And it is so sad.

The crazy train keeps on roll-roll-rollin' along

But fear has been the "normality" since colonial times in our country. It's the core of the American psyche and the center of our politics due to the enslavement of Africans and genocide against Native Americans. Not to mention the countless other injustices committed against other groups who have been denied their human and civil rights.

European settlers on this continent came as conquerors and sought to exterminate the Native Americans, in almost every instance of contact sadly. If that wasn't the case, the "benevolent" policies of the colonizer, which took religious as well as scientific forms, resulted in cultural loss and mass death, as well as long-standing human rights abuses and poverty.

Slavery has engendered a fear of internal rebellion that persists today. Racism against blacks dehumanized this group, principally by defining them as another species and thus irrational and primitive. At best, African-Americans throughout the long history of American racism and white supremacism have been regarded as children (no rights) in relation to the adults (inherent rights), the latter defined as white, English-speaking, Anglo, European, caucasian, etc.

Fear is what must be overcome if our political system is to become healthy (inclusive) and stable (democratic).

just as the new president came into office.

When people don't have to worry so much about putting food on their family, they will calm down, imho.

He gives the politics of fear an historical context.

Before the "black helicopters" of the 1990s, there were right-wingers claiming access to secret documents from the 1920s proving that the entire concept of a "civil rights movement" had been hatched in the Soviet Union; when the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act was introduced, one frequently read in the South that it would "enslave" whites. And back before there were Bolsheviks to blame, paranoids didn't lack for subversives -- anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists even had their own powerful political party in the 1840s and '50s.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/14/AR2009081401495.html?sid=ST2009081402964

Thanks

It always has been.

It started when the colonies were created with the fear of the natives, then just transferred to situations such as the fear that the slaves would revolt, the fear that the Spaniards would take "our" resources, and the fear that women and china-men would forget their places and get all uppity. Of course there was that gnawing fear that that factory and farm workers would form unions, and that they would rise up and actually expect decent pay, benefits, and working conditions.

A Republican Good Old Boy would say it was pre-civil rights era and usually in that tiny time slot between WWII and the 60s. When life mythically seemed like Leave It To Beaver was a reality show. At just about the same time Betty Friedan was writing The Feminine Mystique which ultimately debunked the perpetration that women loved being baby making machines and servants to their families and helped precipitate the second stage of the Feminist movement (the bra burning, birth control sexual liberation and all the other attendant ramifications of what it means to make real choices and pursue real dreams). It was also about the time Kinsey was getting his report together blowing all contemporary thinking about sexual practices out of the water. The 60's happened and the counter culture age was born to large extend because of the Vietnam War where men were drafted and forced to go and give their lives for lies. 58,191 of their names are on the Vietnam Memorial Wall. It took ten years before things got back to 'normal' after the war and the iran hostage situation.

And then normal was when Reagan wrapped himself in the tattered flag and reignited Jingoism and Uber Patriotism and once again we were normal and proud to follow our god given right to wage war and kick ass! The Good old boys took control. Then Greed was big. Bigger than that stupid sexual revolution or the civil rights advances made into law by Johnson. Much bigger than the anti-war movement.

Normal has never been what we think it is as fed to us by our grade school history books, our TVs and our politicians. It just never has.

And they have no reason to give up.