Instead of "Secession And Suicide As Political Statements in the USA", I was tempted to give this post the title of "You Don't have to Be Crazy To Be A Conservative Republican But It Helps". I didn't because it was too easy and perhaps too much of a cheap shot. Nevertheless, the premise is not without some validity.
Behavior and rhetoric by Republicans and pundits on the conservative right throughout the political campaign were rife with documented stories bordering on silliness, stupidity, and, dare I say, craziness if not real insanity. After the re-election of President Barack Obama it got worse.
By various definition, America has had its share of bad presidents. In recent memory, for one reason or another, with disagreement on many fronts, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. Bush, and George W. Bush have been called bad presidents. Three of these, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush were Republican Presidents who were elected for a second term. But at no time did I hear or read about liberals committing suicide or wanting to secede from the union that is the United States of America because the Republican President they deemed a bad president was re-elected.
Many democrats thought it was pure insanity that George W. Bush was elected for a second term. In fact, the record of the Bush White House was so bad that, by the time he left the White House, America was willing, for the first time, to elect a Black President. But they did not elect to secede from the union after that horrendous first term.
As of November 15, 2012 residents in all 50 states have filed petitions to secede from United States of America. In Texas, secession signatures have reached over 110,000. The number may seem significant, but it is not. You can get 100,000 people to do anything--engage in rape as a tactic of war, condone slavery, or commit geoncide in the name of God.
So we have a number of small minded Americans being led by their emotional noses to secede from the United States. Either that or that they are all crazy and don't know or care about American History. They obviously don't remember or don't care about the bloodbath that was the Civil War when the southern states first attempted to secede from the union. America won't let that happen again, because it is insane.
The other insanity is that these secession petitioners likely consider themselves to be real patriots. The insanity is that they would rather destroy the United States than be led by a Black man who they consider to be a bad president. But being led by a bad white president apparently is something they can tolerate without seceding from the union.
President Obama, even with an Obstructionist Republican led House of Representatives blocking the president's every move to help and let all Americans enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, could ever be as bad a president as George W Bush. But there is something about some Americans living life on the conservative right, who perhaps because of bad DNA, corrupt ancestral memories, and a lack of rational sensibilities, would rather have their rights eroded, jobs outsourced to China, live without medical insurance, live in poverty and filth, or die rather than receive leadership or more importantly receive help from a black man who they themselves didn't make do it for them--as in he is not their slave or their boy.
And die is what some of these poor people decided to do. Unfortunately, on an individual level, some personal acts of insanity by suicide and murder as political statements did happen. One woman ran over her husband with a truck because he did not vote for Mitt Romney. A man allegedly left a note that read "Fuck Obama" before overdosing on medication. Another man, allegedly a defense contractor, and whom one could assume was an affluent man, killed himself, his wife, and their two children because Obama was re-elected. There may have been other incidents,or perhaps there were not. But, why did these people commit these acts and blame Barack Obama for their actions? The wife, surely acted out of intense irrational anger. But, people commit suicide for various reasons. Often, however, people who commit suicide do so when they feel trapped, hopeless, beset with gloom and doom, and death seems the only way out.
We can blame pundits and politicians on the conservative right for much of that feeling because so many of their supporters were caught up in the throes of hate, fear, doom, and gloom. That's what happens when so many people get their news and information from pundits, media sources, and politicians who offer them nothing but lies and the spread of hate and fear and dire hopelessness if the other side wins and their side loses.
In reality, you don't have to be crazy to be a conservative Republican, but it helps. You would be better helped, however, if you were liberal enough to be able to see more than one side of an issue and more than one side of America. If you could do that you would know that it is better to move forward and look forward to hope and change and not pay homage to those pundits and politicians who trivialize and make fun of "hope and change", because they don't want you to have any.
