Scapegoat Of The Month!
Oct. 10, 2010By Paul Campbell
The list of groups to hate in the United States is becoming almost too long to keep in your head! For minorities it's just a waiting game to get out of the Number One position and then lay low so somebody else is the object of hate for a while. Blacks and Latinos caught the break when Islamophobia caught fire in America. Now after a decade of abuse Muslims may be in store for a break of their own as both political parties spend tens of millions of dollars spreading hatred of the Chinese!
The national pastime in America isn't baseball or football, it is pointing fingers and blaming some other group for the problems we are all facing. During the midterm elections that group has become the Chinese. Oh sure, the osmotic permeability of our borders is still a hot-button issue, and Islamophobes are preaching the dangers of religious tolerance, but only the Chinese are getting paid advertising twenty-four hours a day to promote Sinophobia.
Some of the ads are pretty ludicrous. An article today in The New York Times International Herald Tribune gives some of the more prominent examples. Cliché and racist as the ads are, the really repugnant thing about them is that they spread hate and tell us nothing about the ideals or values of the people that are running for public office. The American Electorate would be a far better informed bunch and far less prone to civil unrest if the millions were spent telling us what a candidate stands for and what that candidate intends to do, rather than what the candidate sees wrong with their opponent! To cite a quote from an episode of The West Wing, "I don't know what we're for. All we seem to be for is winning, and all we seem to be against is somebody else winning."
NOTE TO CANDIDATES: We don't care what you think your opponent has done wrong. We get it already! What do YOU intend to do about it? The "Yellow Horde" isn't the culprit here, and we want answers not blaming and back-peddling! Either tell us what YOU are going to do, or shut the Hell up!
The vitriolic rhetoric aimed at the Chinese has the high probability of generating increased levels of xenophobia in an already frantically paranoid population, and an equally high probability of generating wide spread hate crimes against Asians in America. If the sinophobic rhetoric continues, both political parties run the risk of potentially being responsible for outright rioting in Asian communities all across the country. Is it really worth jeopardizing the safety of millions of Asian-Americans and running the risk of billions of dollars of destruction of property just to gain or maintain numerical dominance of your political party?
Why are the Chinese suddenly the object of politicians' fury? Transfer Mispricing and the disparity in income tax rates allow US corporations to avoid billions of dollars in income taxes by manufacturing pharmaceuticals in Ireland, but we are yet to see either political party blame the Irish or address the problem. Could it possibly be because Asians look different than the people that are running for office?
I'm not accusing our candidates of being racist or bigots. I am accusing them of being lazy and looking for an easy to spot target by fostering racism and bigotry in others in order to take the heat off the fact that they haven't proposed viable solutions to current problems. We don't care who is to blame. We care about a stable economy.
What's next?
