The Aftermath of the Scary Speech

Obama's speech to the students of the US has come and gone and there are no reported fatalities. Of course, this could just the lull before the storm. When our guard is down, Nancy Pelosi might broadcast the trigger word that was implanted during the speech, then all the children will become ultra-liberal zombies who ravage the country with taxing, spending and creating social programs. Oh! The horror!

Now, Karl Rove has tipped us all off to what really happened; Pres. Obama was going to deliver a speech that would indoctrinate America's children into becoming communist-fascist, Islamic-atheist, terrorist-sissies. Thank goodness the outrage by the Real Americans forced the Antichrist administration to change their evil plan at the last minute, and, thank goodness we have the honesty and integrity of Karl Rove to thank for making that clear. Next, we need to demand to see the real speech as well as the real birth certificate.

Seriously, people like Karl Rove know that the most conservative, most fundamental Xians are very afraid of change and very easily swayed by religious talk, and are therefore easy to manipulate. That is, after all, what Rove did for a living when he worked for George W. Bush. He and other conservative pundits are intentionally tapping into this vulnerability to create a fictitious environment of fear that they know will scare the bejeesus out of a bunch of folks that don't have the rational tools to deal with it objectively.

There are people who were literally afraid to expose their children to a back to school speech. In an interview I read over the weekend, a woman said she didn't want her kids exposed to the President's speech, saying she was an American, the kids are Americans and she is very frightened right now. Does that seem rational to you?

The implication, of course, is that the President of the United States is not an American, that his plans do not consider the best interests of the US's people, and that something really, really, bad is this administration's real goal. They want to avoid their kids' exposure to our President in the same knee-jerk way that they would "protect them" from atheism, evolution and homosexuals. They're scared of the President in a similar way to how I'm scared of knee-jerk reactionaries who are armed with firearms but not with fully functional brains.

Let's Censor the President

Censorship has gone crazy. Science classes have to be edited to avoid conflicting with religious dogma. Books need to be banned from libraries lest someone should perceive the contents thereof as socially acceptable in the community. TV and radio broadcasters are expected to remove shows that some people find offensive, but would never even watch, and some parents even forbid their children from associating with kids from families with different religious beliefs. The list goes on and on.

There used to be one thing that couldn't be censored; addresses by the President of the United States. When Pres. Obama announced that he intended to give a TV address to the students returning to school, parents, even here in Central Ohio, called the schools threatening to keep their children at home if the schools exposed their children to the corruptive influence of the duly elected leader of their national government.

We seem to have created an environment in the US where some people think it is acceptable to be completely intolerant of any opinion other than their own and have a right to demand that nobody is even allowed to be exposed to an opinion other than theirs. Sadly, these narrow-minded folks are frequently the same ones who claim to be the most patriotic Americans and they are also the quickest to scream about their constitutional rights if suppressed in any way. The best solution to this is to teach their children to think objectively and give them a hunger for all knowledge, then maybe the next generation will be more open-minded and have a valid reason for being embarrassed to be seen with their parents.