The anger over health-care reform in America

This is the second part of a two-part column.

The “Tea Party“ demonstrations around the country are a special case. They are apparently aimed at big spending and its product, excessive taxation. It is not exactly clear where theTea Party demonstrators were when we decided to spend hundreds of billions of dollars invading Iraq and bailing out Wall Street. The “blue dog� Democrats were nowhere in sight, either.

The Tea Party protests have clearly been centrally planned, organized and funded, and then implemented as fake “grass-roots� initiatives by special interest groups, corporations, paid lobbyists and professional political organizers. Their covert schemes have been highly successful in angering frustrated, disillusioned citizens, “birthers,� “deathers� and “nay-sayers,� and attracting them to the anti-Obama cause. Most protesters interviewed in Connecticut, however, said they were unaware of any such special interest backing for, or connection to, their own protests against “Obama-care.�

The fact that some of the demonstrations have the backing of corporate “self-interest� groups does not explain, by itself, the extraordinarily receptive, fertile ground found among many frightened, angry and misinformed citizens. These are people who have seen American industry and jobs exported abroad, homes foreclosed, pensions lost, fraud and pornography rampant, and America denigrated as the torture capital of the world.

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Americans today are learning more and more about the actual reality of American history: Native American genocide, slavery, the KKK and Jim Crow laws, anti-Semitism, American imperialism (the seizure of Hawaii, for example), the fact (not theory) of evolution, climate change, environmental destruction, Japanese-American internment camps, McCarthy witch hunts, CIA, NSA and other uncontrolled interventions at home and abroad, wars of aggression (most recently in Iraq), extra-judicial assassinations, denial of habeas corpus, prisoner abuse, torture, rendition to other countries and other crimes against humanity.

All of this is too much for many Americans to absorb. It’s not what we were taught in primary school about the origin and character of the America we love — the land of the free and the home of the brave. People feel out of control, as if we were losing our own country, our belief system. One is torn between rage and denial. To seek the truth about our history then becomes “unpatriotic.� To consider new ways of cooperation becomes “foreign� and “socialist.�

Americans need someone, somewhere, on whom to vent their anger and frustration. Abused and misinformed by a few, select barons of private, de-regulated “laissez-faire� capitalism, many Americans misdirect their anger and resentment against “government� and against the very persons who stand between them and disaster. A few corporate self-interest groups and their front-men in the media (Fox News, for example) seize on this instability further to deceive the public and reinforce their misdirected anger.

Many Americans today do not recognize the country they live in or understand why they themselves, and Americans generally, have lost their affluence, their influence, their respectability and moral standing in the world. They are ripe for fear and hate-mongering and exploitation. These are the angry citizens we see protesting against health-care reform — against their own self-interest.

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What’s the answer to this downward spiral? Part of the answer certainly is better education, more truthful, analytical media reporting, and some “inconvenient� truth-telling. For example, check out Michael Moore’s new film, “Capitalism, or the ‘Legalization of Greed.’� We need a return to old-time investigative journalism, Brian Ross style — the true role of the “Fourth Estate.�

We are lucky to have a fresh, intelligent and moral personality in the presidency at this time in our history. We could perhaps do without some of his economic advisers, such as Summers, Rubin and Greenspan, whose “conservative� philosophy helped bring about the economic debacle we face today. We need to change that.

With hoped-for economic recovery and socially responsible government, all Americans can regain the respect and attain the health outcomes they need and deserve. Then, and only then, the anger will fade, and we shall become “one people out of many.�

Sharon resident Anthony Piel is a former director and legal counsel of the World Health Organization.