Getting America's attention

We've got it pretty good in this country, and most of us are content, and busy.  Busy making money, busy falling in love, busy with all our various distractions.  There are over 300 million of us, living our busy lives, and it takes a long time to get the whole country's attention when something is amiss.

I've been worrying and going on about neoconservatives and Teabaggers for a long time.  There are others like me, and we tend to get ignored because we're perceived as people who complain too much; and the more we're ignored, the more worried we get, and that makes us talk all the more.

The complainers on my side of the political spectrum have become alarmed about the complainers on the other end, who have made noises about revolting if the next election doesn't go their way.  We're alarmed that the Republican Party has been taken over by people who are ignorant, and who laud ignorance.  Today's Republican Party is in the difficult position of having to disguise their agenda because so much of it is unpopular with people when it is spelled out to them.

If you ask people if they prefer Obama's programs or Romney's, a certain number of the respondents will say Romney's.  But when you ask them about individual questions without mentioning which candidate espouses them, a much lower number of people choose Romney's programs.  Clearly, many people don't study the issues much.  They're too busy to really pay attention.

Now, there are people on the far right, as we know, who want to dismantle the New Deal completely.  They want to privatize Social Security and end Medicare.  There are people on the far right who actually want our children taught that slavery wasn't so bad.  As I have mentioned before, once upon a time, conservatives would have been happy if the government would stop giving handouts to the unemployed; now the Teabaggers are against helping the poor even if they are working.  Once upon a time, the pro-life movement would have been happy to stop abortion; now they are attacking all forms of birth control.

The Republican Party knows that the things they believe in are unpopular if they are understood properly.  So they're running a sort of stealth campaign.  They want their programs passed even if the populace doesn't like those programs.  However, recent statements by some of the most extreme Republicans may have shaken the nation awake.

Todd Akin, Republican candidate for the Senate from Missouri has come under fire for saying that women's bodies can naturally prevent pregnancy by a rapist.  Their fear of this traumatic event, Mr. Akin claims, causes some sort of chemical change in their bodies that keeps them from getting pregnant.  Now, I don't know if Akin really believes this, although he probably does, but he's not a lone ignoramus.  This belief is widespread among pro-lifers who want abortion banned with no exceptions.  If they don't believe in pregnancy by rape, they don't have to worry about the exception.

The nastiest part of this, of course, is that if a woman is raped and gets pregnant, it's proof that she wanted it.

This story has gotten a lot of attention, and I think it may have alerted the sleepier members of the population that there is madness afoot.  Perhaps the electorate will begin to pay attention to what the candidates believe in.  For that, we can thank the overreach of the Teabaggers.