Health Care Town Hall Meeting

I attended Congressman Joe Courtney’s town hall meeting on health care last evening in Montville. I left pessimistic about the future of democracy, disgusted with my fellow citizens, and frightened. About 1500 people attended, perhaps 60% implacable opponents of health care reform. These folks booed, jeered, interrupted, read speeches written by others, made threats, and spewed demonstrably false information about the quality of American health care and death panels. They did not listen as Rep. Courtney politely and carefully explained the bill. They asked questions that were previously answered.

Remarkably, the vast majority of those excoriating government run health care depend on government run health care, through Medicare, Veterans benefits, or military retirement. Rep. Courtney was far too polite and political to call them out for their rank hypocrisy.

The meeting should never have been held. There was no one in the middle; there was no one with an open mind. The town hall meeting just served as a rally for the lynch mob. I wasn’t in Germany in the 30’s, but last night I felt that I was.

These people were not stupid. But they did see the world in black and white terms. And, they were scared. Scared of change; scared of growing old; scared of a black man as President. That fright became manifest in their refusal to extend health care to anyone: the young, the disabled, the poor. They would protect their own status in society by destroying the lives of those below them. The notion of a body politic was foreign to them. They had no compassion for their neighbors.

This borderline personality also manifested itself in extreme jingoism. The crowd demanded the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. And, they worked themselves up with cries of how America was second to none in health care, despite report after report showing the US to be at the bottom of developed nations across the board and to be at the very bottom in infant mortality.

Just like the crowds chanting USA, these folks had to believe that we were the best. As far as I can tell, the only areas in which we lead the world in health care are plastic surgery and hip replacement.

Is the bottom line that these people are mortified by two realities: that their own status in society is plummeting just as America’s status in the world is dropping? Are the members of the angry mob yearning for the romantic nostalgia of mattering individually and having the solace of being part of the preeminent nation on earth? They know that their sense of self-worth is slipping away. They seek to regain it through expressions of hostility and by threatening agents of change.