Living on the Edge

I’m finally old enough to see history repeat. It’s not that I haven’t ever seen history repeat before, but that I am finally old enough to have thought deeply about events the first time I witnessed them and to remember those thoughts now as I watch them unfold anew.

What’s bringing this on was an op-ed piece in The New York Times this weekend by Nobel Prize-winning economist and author Paul Krugman. Titled “The Big Hate,” the piece dredged up the zeitgeist of the early 1990s, an era when the right-wing extremism that culimated with the Oklahoma City bombing reigned, and compared it with the signs of the times today. Krugman writes:

Back in April, there was a huge fuss over an internal report by the Department of Homeland Security warning that current conditions resemble those in the early 1990s — a time marked by an upsurge of right-wing extremism that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Conservatives were outraged. The chairman of the Republican National Committee denounced the report as an attempt to “segment out conservatives in this country who have a different philosophy or view from this administration” and label them as terrorists.

But with the murder of Dr. George Tiller by an anti-abortion fanatic, closely followed by a shooting by a white supremacist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the analysis looks prescient.

There is, however, one important thing that the D.H.S. report didn’t say: Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.

The point of Krugman’s column is that neoconservative hate and fear on the airwaves, spouted most notably by the likes Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly (all of whom began their rise to prominence in the early ’90s), has erased the “dividing line there was between mainstream conservatism and the black-helicopter crowd.” And it’s calling out its troops to commit violence in the name of righting society’s wrongs.

It’s eerie how similar not only the world is to those days in the early ’90s, but also that my circumstances are somewhat the same. Back then I was a young college student, a year away from graduation, watching my friends desperately slog through the job market looking for work that wasn’t coming and struggling under the weight of broken promises and dreams and a mountain of debt. Today, I’m a not-so-young graduate student, a year away from graduation, watching friends worry about losing the jobs they have, struggling under broken dreams and the broken promise of the American dream, and wondering what legacy they have to pass on to their kids.

The song that made for the perfect soundtrack of those years was Aerosmith’s Living on the Edge, released in 1993 and Steven Tyler’s poignant musing on the sad state of the world:

There’s something wrong with the world today
I don’t know what it is
Something’s wrong with our eyes

We’re seeing things in a different way
And God knows it ain’t his
It sure ain’t no surprise

The economy was in the tank, we were a year into the first Democratic presidency in more than a decade, dealing with the fallout of a war in Iraq — and Krugman is right, the airwaves were filled with hate-spouting disc jockeys who blamed the ills of the world on … everyone except themselves. And here we are again.

Was it just a year ago that “Got hope?” was the question on the nation’s lips?

I think Krugman too easily to blames the neocon shock jocks for violence and for the fear that’s living in the hearts of too many Americans. Whatever it is that pushes a person over the edge to kill the perceived enemies who are, in fact, fellow human beings who are in the same boat as they, it isn’t just voices on the talkbox. These voices are simply parasites that survive and thrive when there is a fertile feeding ground. Blaming the shock jocks is not much different from the shock jocks blaming the nation’s ills on the new president: It’s targeting a single source when the causes are in fact legion.

Krugman ends his column with a warning that we must take these threats seriously, and that we ignore them at our own peril, which is true. But Krugman is wrong if he thinks that what’s wrong with the world today is only affecting the lone wolves and conspiracy theorists who listen to talk radio and Fox News. Now, as then, we’re still in the same boat, still living on the edge and trying to keep from falling. It’s just that some of us are closer to the edge than others, but we all might get there eventually.

I’d like to think that “Got Hope” wasn’t just a campaign slogan, but a way that we counter national despair. Obama’s slogans weren’t just uplifting to the individual, but also reminded us of our community obligations and joys, that the power of “Yes We Can” came from the We part. Instead of watching our neighbors with suspicion to ferret out the next perpetrator of violence, maybe we can reach out and say, “I know how it feels, I’m in the same boat,” and look for ways that all of us together can counter the peril of our times. We change the power the voices of hate have by changing the ground they feed on. We learn to hang together, so that we don’t hang separately.

Something right with the world today
And everybody knows its wrong
But we can tell em no
Or we could let it go
But I would rather be a hanging on