Whispers from the Wild

I find it somewhat worrying how much hate there seems to be between Republicans and Democrats. It doesn’t seem quite as bad the other way around, but from an outside perspective it certainly looks like America has become a country of two very different factions.

The recent visit of the Iranian president to the United Nations was a case in point. Though readily accusing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of being a figure who hates America, hates Israel and hates – well, just about everyone and everything – the right wing particularly spewed out an unbelievable amount of hatred towards him, doing the very thing they were accusing him of.

The thing is, Ahmadinejad is a politician, just like Bush is a politician and Cheney is a politician. He will take a public stance that gets votes in his own country. That doesn’t make him the devil incarnate, and in fact we will probably never know what he thinks in private, as most politicians try their hardest to hide that.

Yet still there were very nasty insults, accusations of being a terrorist, accusations – without a great deal of evidence, I might add – that he was the “enemy of freedom” and, despite the fact that under international law Iran is quite legally permitted to have nuclear capability so long as it is for civilian use, not military use, it was insisted by the right wing that he be hated for the nuclear weapons he is “obviously” (in the same way it was “obvious” that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction) wanting to make.

Now there is much talk and much rumbling among right wingers in the US not about if Iran is to be bombed, but about when and how it is to be bombed. Does that sound like anything but hatred to you?

And to make things even worse, American turned on American over it. Anyone – Democrats being favoured targets – who remotely seemed to want to listen to anything Ahmadinejad had to say was somehow a “traitor”, and this is the most worrying thing of all. To be branded a traitor is a serious thing. It indicates that you have no loyalty to your country or any organisation to which you belong, something which the average American, be they Democrat or Republican, is vehemently opposed to. Yet we see the very same sort of hate that Ahmadinejad is accused of showing being turned on people who do not share the same opinions, but are fellow countrymen and women – and that is the worst thing yet!

As the US election looms ever closer, political activists (on both sides, though generally Republicans far more than Democrats) seem all too eager to throw around the “T” word when describing their political opponents. From an outside perspective it’s distinctly worrying to see the level of hatred shown to one another, because if Americans are willing to show that degree of hatred to one another, how much are they prepared to show to non-Americans? “Hatriots” is just the latest in a series of new words that average comment-leavers on some blogs are using to describe opposite political view holders, and it really makes me shake my head in disbelief when someone is so disrespectful of an alternated opinion that they should denigrate the party to whom that person has a leaning with such terms as “Donkaroaches” instead of Democrat. Do these people seriously think that doesn’t sound like the very hatred these “lovers of free society” claim to be opposing?

Day after day, people in the “land of the free” where free speech is, apparently, supposed to be encouraged are tearing into one another with the most appalling displays of hatred that leave one wondering that in comparison with such hatred – just how different, if indeed he is different, is Ahmadinejad?

Haters on both sides of the political divide in America – remove the log from your own eye before you start viciously attacking someone else for the speck in theirs!