Texas under martial law

It would be funny if it wasn't so sad. There has been a paranoid fringe in this country for decades; crazies who believe the government is going to swoop down in black helicopters and confiscate everybody's guns, suspend Constitutional rights and place the country under martial law. Even though this unfounded fear has been around for a long time, it reached a crescendo shortly after we elected Barack Obama as President seven years ago and has not died down since.

The paradox is Republicans don't allow Democrats the same leeway when it comes to criticizing the government. If there are protests or complaints about our involvement in wars, the buildup of the military and human rights abuses in countries around the world the United States supports, the reaction is swift and poisonous. Democrats are called Communists, Socialists, bleeding-heart liberals, soft-on-crime, supporters of the welfare state and any other derogatory comment the opposition can conjure up. I remember when protestors to the Vietnam War were assaulted, beaten up, thrown in jail and called every name in the book by "Pro-Americans" who wore tee-shirts and put bumper stickers on their cars with messages like "America: Love it or Leave it" and "America: Right or Wrong."

But today many of the same political persuasion stand face to face against our government with guns drawn like Clive Bundy and his followers did a year ago in Nevada. And people with the same political persuasion claimed last week that a military training exercise named Jade Helm 15 was a covert attempt by the military to place the entire state of Texas under Martial Law. This attitude was laughable when it was only subscribed to by the paranoid fringe but evidently it's contagious because it seems to be spreading. In fact the Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, raised the hysteria even higher when he ordered the State Guard to monitor the U.S troops, saying he was concerned for Texans "constitutional rights." By doing so, attitudes that were held only by those on the extreme right just a few years ago have now made it into the mainstream.

And, according to Leslie Savan in The Nation.com, the levels of paranoia go far beyond national boundaries. Walmart felt obligated to deny a widespread rumor that all its Texas stores were closing so Federal officials could use them as internment camps. Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz and Representative Louie Gohmert joined the Governor in validating the conspiracy theories. Gohmert was quoted as saying that "Patriotic Americans have reason to be concerned."

I don't know how all this happened. I was born in Little Rock Arkansas, raised in Atkins, Arkansas. I've lived my entire life in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. I've never once doubted or questioned the motives of our government, although I've certainly criticized individual people within the government. But our government is too vast and complicated for any one perspective to rule over all the others. It's similar to the rumors that circulated after our moon landing in 1969 that the video was shot in the deserts of Arizona instead of on the surface of the moon and that man had never left the confines of earth. This was a conspiracy theory that had legs too and many people still believe it, even though it would have required the secrecy of literally thousands of people to have kept something like that quiet. And all of us know how hard it is to get ONE person to keep their mouth shut.

This growing hysteria among certain groups within this country is beyond me. Challenging and criticizing the government has become a way of life for many of them and there appears to be no end in sight unless we elect a Republican President.

But because most of the early leaders in the Republican Presidential polls are anti-education, anti-immigration, anti-poor, pro-business, pro-wealth and supporters of the ever growing military industrial complex that a Republican President, Dwight David Eisenhower, warned us about back in the 1950's, that's not likely to happen.