Last year, right-wing Congresswoman Michelle Bachman told crowds to “get armed and dangerous.” Sarah Palin, John Boehner and other Republicans continue to lace their language with the rhetoric of violence.
Words matter. They become deeds: like the murders of Dr. George Tiller, the Holocaust Museum guard in Washington and two sheriff’s deputies in Pittsburgh; then the suicide plane attack on the IRS building in Texas; and now the arrest of fundamentalist Christian militia members in Michigan who planned the mass murder of policemen.
Mark my words: America has as much to fear from its own far right as from foreign terrorists.
Just as al-Qaida takes the most apocalyptic verses of the Koran out of context, using them to incite hatred and violence, so far-right fundamentalists claiming to be Christians do with the Bible.
Maybe we should consider this: God does not speak through old books. God speaks through the still, small voice of compassion in the human heart. If we don’t start listening to our hearts, and continue to project our fear and rage on foreigners, gay people, Muslims, liberals, (pick your favorite scapegoat), this nation will explode with the same sectarian violence we so righteously try to suppress in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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