Health Care Showdowns and Fisticuffs

People rising up and taking their message to the streets used to be one of the most powerful visual statements an organization or movement could make. The Civil Rights movement has been visually epitomized by images of folks like Martin Luther King, Jr., locked arm-in-arm with like-minded brothers and sisters in places like Birmingham and Memphis.

For the uninvolved layman, the nation's capitol and all of its monuments of the country's genesis and origins provides a potent stage, and has carried the messages of numerous movements, such as the Vietnam War protests at the Washington Monument's reflecting pool.

Grassroots movements aim to evoke that imagery and appeal, convincing and educating the common, everyday person to take up their picket and join the fight for whatever it is the organizers or those who have the most vested interest in the movement is proposing. Grassroots hope to appeal to that everyman and in doing so, multiply their ranks exponentially.

It's the whole point of any political campaign in general: Tell your message to as many people as there are willing to listen, and get them to tell others, so that they'll vote for you. That's pretty much the whole ball of wax right there. It's a fine method of pushing not only candidates, but also politically-driven agendas.

Like this health care thing, which has gone from complex and frustrating to loud and raucous. Democratic senators and congressional delegates are being met by what Sean Hannity would call mobs of people at their usually mundane town hall meetings to discuss the goings-on in Washington, with the topic du jour being, of course, health care reform.

They are met with taunts, jeers, and rowdy chants. Some even burn the politicians in effigy, which is not only over-the-line and overly aggressive, but outdated and exceedingly unoriginal. Democrats have been responding with outrage, leading some, like Arkansas' Sen. Blanche Lincoln to say they are "disrespectful and un-American," a statement which she later retracted.

The most common dismissal of these former TEA-partiers-turned "Obamacare"-protesters is that it's "Astroturfing," or fake-grassroots. They accuse the organizers to rile up and organizing these people to get out and throw about 8,000 monkey wrenches into the fast moving gears of the legislative machine.

The problem with that line of defense is that Democrats and Health Care Reform advocates do plenty of grassrooting and astroturfing of their own.

They send out pamphlets. They call people (and, aw horsefeathers, always around dinner time, too!) at their homes to talk about health care reform and why it needs to be done as quickly as possible and why Republicans and moderate Democrats are just wrong about everything, but especially health care reform, etc. etc. etc.

The pot is calling the kettle black, and the kettle is firing back about the pot being black, too. But if the pot and kettle have both been black for as long as cookware has been around, why would the pot or the kettle start acting offended by it (Ed. Note - Rampant Metaphor Running Amok? Check.)?

I think it has something to do with the lack of appeal of the march-on-wherever, or at least the diminishing of its impact. It's sort of like using a really good curse word: If it's used rarely, and only in appropriate situation, it connotes an appropriate amount of emotions or seriousness, or whatever the user is trying to portend. But if it's a guy who uses the word in the rigmarole of daily life, in any and all uses, in any and all contexts or mindsets, it loses its luster.

It'll still grab some people's attention, but for the most part, it'll just be a part of the droning noise. Grassroots movements are still potent, as seen by both health care former advocates and antagonists, and still can rile up a great bevy of those in the middle. But the fighting on either side, I would contend, isn't sneaky, dirty, underhanded, or a sign of a lack of message.

On either side, I say again. Those currently in the spotlight are the rightward health care dissuaders, crashing these town hall meetings. They are certainly going a little overboard, with reports of fistfighting going on over it. But their presence should not only be expected, but if their opposition is worth anything, countered.

And for the record, whining about their organization, when your side is clearly just as organized but not as effective, is not a good parry. Not saying Democrats or health care advocates should harpoon a big, stuffed John Boehner facsimile, but surely they've got some other statement or plan.