Professor Emeritus Newquist has a reply to my last post on his Keloland site: That New-Found Maturity. I thought that his title involved sarcasm. To my surprise, it rather confirmed my point. He directs us to a gallery of images at TPM taken at today's Anti-Mosque rally in New York and the Tea Party rally in D.C.
Here is the image that he inserted in his post, with a little more clarity:
Now the anti-Pelosi sign is a bit over the top. As an example of extreme and vicious rhetoric in English speaking democracies, it is still rather mild. Her t-shirt, one must admit, is funny.
I scrolled through the images of both rallies, and there were a few Loony Tunes running around. Here is one example from the D.D. rally.
That is surely a suggestion of political violence.
And there is this one from the New York rally. This is, for several reasons, a manifestly racist display.
The two galleries add up to about fifty photos. Scrolling through them, a handful of them are over the top. Most, however, are quite tame. You see men and women dressed in colonial attire, and a lot of strong protest slogans. You will find very little that would have seemed the least bit objectionable to someone on the left if they had been directed at, say, George W. Bush.
Very few Americans ever attend political rallies. Those who do, on the left or right, are the most motivated and, frequently, represent the most extreme sliver of the population. One may that the TPM photographers were looking for noteworthy displays.
With that in mind, you have to conclude that folks at these rallies were, by and large, behaving responsibly. These are Americans who are not afraid to express their opinions. They also seem to know that they and their cause will be judge by how they express themselves.
If these photos are a fair sample of the rallies, they confirm my original point. There is no "new-found maturity" here. We have been maturing for a long time. These rallies are exactly what you hope for in a democracy. As I have said, I am not offended by the building of the Islamic Center near Ground Zero. Unlike some of my friends on the left, I do not label people as bigots or extremists just because they disagree with me.
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