There were two stories running parallel this week, and most of the developments in both of them were fairly depressing.
The Affordable Care Act went before a Supreme Court that seemed to be engaged in little more than ideological mummery. (And can we pause for a moment and cheer once again for the bipartisan "compromise" that produced Justice Samuel Alito? Joe Lieberman's contributions to democracy will live on after him.)
Meanwhile, in Florida, the fallout from the shooting of Trayvon Martin became more poisonous as the conservative press, for reasons that only they can possibly understand, decided to take up the cause of George Zimmerman, not out of a sense of outraged justice, but simply because it would line them up against the people they always line themselves up against. What brought these two stories together was an unpleasant common theme of expendability.
The angry crowd on the steps of the Supreme Court, and the corporate money that is ginning them up, and the conservative politicians who hide behind both the angry crowd and the corporate money, all have in their arguments the sense that some of their fellow citizens are permanently expendable. There were more than a few signs telling Sandra Fluke to "buy her own birth control" and more than a few speeches about "my" health care and a lot of talk about "freeloaders." Bear in mind: There is no conservative alternative worthy of the name to the current health-care law. If the law falls, at best, we go back to the status quo ante, with pre-existing conditions again whatever some beancounter says they are, and debt-laden college students forced to fend for themselves in a predatory market. People will be rendered expendable to someone else's bizarre and twisted notion of "freedom."
The assault on Trayvon Martin's character implicitly argues that he was expendable, too, the once-living price we "all" have to pay to be free in the exercise of our Second Amendment rights. It began almost immediately after he hit the pavement. They drug-tested him, but not the man who shot him. Now, we've got conservative "journalists" creepy-crawling through every aspect of his life to find some reason... well, to find some reason for what? That he was a kid who tweeted silly stuff, posted some silly stuff on Facebook, and once got suspended because he was found with a bag that may once have held marijuana? This is not a search for justice. It's a search for an alibi, and it's a search through some of the uglier aspects of American society to find the oldest, cheapest alibi of all — that the lives of black children are less important than the right of someone to pack heat, that the lives of black children must needs always take a back seat to fear, that black children in this country are bargaining chips, and not very valuable ones at that.
I continue to fear we're entering a time of terrible selfishness in this country. We are never at our best with each other when the economy gets soft and the ground begins to shake. We trade a serious search for the reasons why things happen into an unserious exploration for who's to blame when they do.
I watched people outside the Supreme Court this week essentially tell their fellow citizens to take it or leave it, and to intimate that the president is far along in his attempt to turn the country into the Soviet Union or, worse, Canada. (Michele Bachmann, an actual member of Congress, pretty much said this explicitly.) Nobody's problems were more important than their right to believe the nonsense they'd been fed.
I watched the coverage of the Martin case this week and realized that the country is turning into an armed confessional, where we absolve ourselves by destroying the immediate object of our national sins. The only way left for too many of us to prove that the days of racism in this country are over is to turn the possibility back on the people most immediately affected by it.
All our investments in each other are vicarious now. Everything is a prop in our personal dramas. The universe of who is expendable gets larger by the day.
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