Dangerous liaisons.

September 12, Lake in the Hills.

As we headed home after breakfast and too many garage sales people began to gather along the street, bearing homemade signs. A dozen people maybe, with signs that read, among others, "Fascism" and "No to Obama care" with the "o" in Obama filled with the Soviet Union's Communist emblem. They called for honks if you agreed. There were quite a lot of honks.
Later I realized that the folks from this very proper, upper-middle-class, cookie-cutter box-type-home suburbia were part of a larger movement, the so-called Tea Party protest, demonstrating the same day in Washington, D.C. Fascist, Nazi, read the signs there too, along with the now-familiar "Socialism."
As the daughter of a woman who grew up during World War II in a family involved with the Resistance, who had to flee her home with only what the family could fit into the car (my mother remembers clutching her favorite doll,) a woman who to this day can't stand the sight and sound of black leather boots preferred by the Gestapo torturers she sometimes heard pace her home, I am greatly offended by the irresponsible, casual use of those loaded words. The sheer ignorance of history they belie is repugnant, and so is the disrespect they pay the millions who suffered and died under such regimes. And what to say, other than laugh in light of the mind-boggling absurdity, of accusations of Communism hurled right along those of Fascism?
But ignorance doesn't bother with history: it is how its most horrendous mistakes are repeated. There is a place for an intelligent, civic debate on any issue in America, and it shouldn't welcome such ignorance and fear-mongering. The extreme-right and the good folks that follow them blindly need to go back to school to learn how to speak the language of civil society - the language of reason, and democracy.
Shame, shame, shame on the fear-mongers.