What the Shouting is About

Leonard Pitts nails the real reason for the town hall shouting matches (hint: it isn't health care policy).

On tax day they were the ones who, having apparently just discovered the grim tidings April 15 brings us all each year, launched angry, unruly protests. In the debate over healthcare reform, they are the ones who have disrupted town hall meetings, shouting about the president's supposed plan for "death panels'' to euthanize the elderly...It remains unclear, once you get beyond the realm of Internet myth, alarmist rhetoric and blatant lie, what the substance of the president's supposed tyranny might be. "Socialized healthcare?'' Given that our libraries, schools, police and fire departments are all "socialized,'' that's hard to swallow.

We frame the differences in terms of "conservative'' and "liberal,'' but these are tired old markers that with overuse and misuse have largely lost whatever meaning they used to have and with it, any ability to explain us to us. This isn't liberal vs. conservative, it is yesterday vs. tomorrow, the stress of profound cultural and demographic changes that will leave none of us as we were. And change, almost by definition, always comes too fast, always brings a sense of stark dislocation. As in the woman who cried to a reporter, "I want my country back!'' Probably the country she meant still had Beaver Cleaver on TV and Doris Day on Your Hit Parade.

--Ballard Burgher