Tea Party Humanity

 
 I had to take my daughter down to Children's Hospital in Cincinnati today for a scheduled appointment with an orthopedic doctor (possible hip surgery).  Travelling through the surrounding neighborhoods, I couldn't help but notice some of the once-fine architecture.  Tudors with rotting wood beams, collapsing roofs and concrete walkway arches chipping and covered with spray-painted obscenities.  I tried to imagine what the neighborhood would have looked like in the 1930's, 1940's or even the 1950's.  There was most certainly not bold, wavy, orange, blue and white gang graffiti highlighted in black on the walls of buildings, houses, sidewalks, retaining walls and old railway buildings.  There were probably not empty 40 ounce malt liquor bottles not-so-carefully concealed in brown paper bags, laying forlorn like stray cattle on almost every green space between the sidewalks and the streets.  There was probably not busted glass in a kaleidescope of brown, green, and clear at splayed over the brownish-white concrete at crossing corners that flash "Don't Walk" and "Walk" like Christmas lights in an otherwise drab and dreary landscape.  There probably weren't groups of teenage youths milling about smoking cigarettes and intimidating passersby like a pride of lions ready to pounce upon their prey.  Judging from the architecture, it is easy to imagine that those very same streets were clean, the Tudor houses gleaming with white paint highlighted with dark brown lumber, and the youths in school learning the fundamentals that would make them productive citizens in a brave new world of opportunity.  You could imagine that those streets that are frightening to walk in daylight today with scattered shell casings and broken glass would have been comfortable and safe to walk even at night in those days.
 
And I couldn't but wonder what happened to us as a nation?  Did we become self-absorbed?  Did we dispense with the time-honored reverence of the God as our foundation?  Did we lose our moorings to our founding principles?  Then it occurred to me that the problem lies with each of us.  We have forgotten what it means to be human.  We have forgotten that the individual who cut us off in traffic and whom we cursed and wished death is a human being just like ourselves.  That person has dreams and hopes just like ourselves.  That person has pain and joy, success and failure.  That person has a mind, body and a spirit as does every one of us.  We are not ephemeral blobs of tissue wandering aimlessly through our lives destined but to consume and die like wild animals in the wilderness.  The wilderness we walk today is of our own creation.  We don't respect one another.  We no longer recognize the humanity of the other individual.  The real flesh and blood person we meet on the street, at a social gathering, or in the workplace is not just a two-dimensional character from Grey's Anatomy or Modern Family conveyed in the phosphors of a 52" plasma screen television.  But we often regard others as two-dimensional creatures that can either help us get what we desire or impede us from our objectives.  The guy at Taco Bell makes a mistake on our order and we either let loose with words spoken out of anger or slam the Burrito Supreme against the window of the restaurant splattering like abstract art, taco sauce running like life-blood down the safety glass analogous to that of the individual we killed with our words.
 
My thoughts turned to the Tea party movement.  Sometimes the easiest thing is to "kill" the opposition with our speech or our written words (I'm guilty!), forgetting that the individuals that we slam (even though they slam us) are still human beings.  They are not their ideology nor their belief system.  Their venom does not preclude the fact that they are human.  Like the man in Taco Bell, they make mistakes; physical mistakes or mistakes of thought and belief.  Human beings are flawed creatures.  Not one of us operates at a long-term level of perfection, if at all.
 
I have been to many Tea Party meetings- bi-monthly local meetings, leadership meetings and event meetings over the past year.  Many pit one individual's thoughts or beliefs against another.  Even within the movement, there is a tendency to forget that the person speaking at the moment is a human being, not just words and ideas.  I've seen interruptions, rudeness, lack of respect, and a "will to power" that betrays the fact that each person is valuable, each person is deserving of proper decorum.  There have been people cut off in mid-sentence, talked over, ignored and the louder the rhetoric, the more attention paid.  Yet, each person is in him or herself valuable.  There was a phrase frequently uttered but sparingly applied in churches a few years back that makes a good point:  "Love the sinner, but hate the sin."   I am reminded of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman- Willie Loman was a flawed character, a sinful character given to rationalization and delusion, but he was still a human being. 
 
"You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away - a man is not a piece of fruit."
- Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman, Act 2

I agree. Very nicely written. Your post references the loss of decorum and respect for the individual in society and how that has led to society's decay, both in regard to people as well as once proud neighborhoods. With respect to Middletown, it has worked both ways. The city leaders including Council and the city manager have demonstrated a lack of respect for and a propensity to ignore the people of the city. In return, the people have no respect for the leaders and have retaliated by throwing the stones back at them. We want to sit down with the city leaders (a good start would be to get a response in Citizens Comments in the city council meetings but Mulligan refuses to change his approach) and discuss the issues with the city and why we are not in tune with the decisions the leaders are making. Until they want to sit with us, we have no choice but to fight them on each decision made. Given the current situation, the leaders and the people will never be on the same page. The only recourse the people have is to keep changing the players until we collect a group of people who will listen. JMO