Provocative OpEd - A call to protest ignites call to arms (sorry if dupe)

"There are all kinds of explanations for how Americans lost their grass-roots political mojo: iPods have been invoked, along with computer games and anti-depressants."

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/26/opinion/la-oe-ehrenreich-guns-20110126

A call to protest ignites a call to arms

The reaction to Frances Fox Piven's essay urging the unemployed to protest for change shows that we are no longer a democracy but a tyranny of the heavily armed.

Op-Ed
January 26, 2011|By Barbara Ehrenreich

Why are Americans such wusses? Threaten the Greeks with job losses and benefit cuts and they tie up Athens, but take away Americans' jobs, 401(k)s, even their homes, and they pretty much roll over. Tell British students that their tuition is about to go up and they take to the streets; American students just amp up their doses of Prozac.

The question has been raised many times in the last few years, by a variety of scholars and commentators -- this one included -- but when the eminent social scientist Frances Fox Piven brought it up at the end of December in an essay titled "Mobilizing the Jobless," all hell broke loose. An editor of Glenn Beck's website, theblaze.com, posted a piece sporting the specious headline "Frances Fox Piven Rings in the New Year by Calling for Violent Revolution," and, just two weeks before the Tucson shootings, the death threats started flying. Many of the most provocative comments have been removed from the site's comment section, but at one time they included such charming posts as: "Bring it on biotch . we're armed to the teeth." Or: "We're all for violence and change, Francis . Where do your loved ones live?"

If the dozens of Beck fans rhetorically brandishing their weapons at Piven were all CEOs, bankers, hedge fund operators and so forth -- i.e., the kind of people who have the most to lose from mass protests by the unemployed -- all this might make more sense. But somehow, and I may be naive about these things, it's hard to imagine a multimillionaire suggesting that "folks buy battle carbines with folding or collapseable stocks and 16<-inch> barrels so they can be more easily hidden under jackets and such. Also, buy in NATO-approved calibers (5.56/.223, 7.62/.308) so you can resupply ammo from the bodies of your enemies too." One of Piven's would-be assassins even admits to being out of work, a condition he or she blames, oddly enough, on Piven herself, adding that "we should blowup office and home."

more at link above...

And yet there are those on DU who would defend such an enemy of the people.

for that matter. They serve no real or good purpose.