Letters to the Editor
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Deteriorating as a person
O'Reilly and others like him claim that they are trying to restore traditional culture and values. They're not. What they are doing is helping to turn otherwise normal and nice people into shrill and angry people, artifically inflated with a sense of their own rightness.
Many of us have had the "who are these people?" experience. I've read the stories here, and they are heartbreaking. In my case it was an aunt and uncle in rural Oregon. They were ordinary, nice people, orchard owners, quick to talk about the harvest, what the other relatives were doing, the latest happenings at Sunday school. Then a few months later it was Rush this, Rush that, and the conversation turned strange and boring.
But I don't entirely blame Rush, Bill, and all the others. An adult has to decide what kind of person he or she wants to be. If someone wants to be perpetually pissed-off, perpetually outraged and filled with umbrage, that's a choice that an adult can make.
And here the movie _American History X_ can give us some understanding of how to respond to adults who have made that choice. In the movie a high school principal confronts a nazi skinhead with a simple question: has anything you've done made your life better? This is the question I would ask the right-wing devotee: after the countless hours of Rush, Bill, et al, after the continual anger and outrage, after the hatred of "liberals," and all the many others you don't like, in what way has all of that made your life any better?