Town Hall Meeting Disruptions

A couple of years ago, John Kerry came to the University of Florida here in Gainesville to hold a public forum on various issues of interest. The meeting was structured similarly to the town hall meetings that politicians nowadays hold so often. During the question and answer period, Andrew Meyer, a UF student, hogged the microphone and posed some pretty provocative questions to the Massachusetts senator. For his efforts, Meyer was wrestled down to the floor by the local University Police, Tasered ("don't Tase me bro'"), handcuffed, arrested, and carted off to jail. Later he apologized for his behavior (although the grossly overreacting police didn't for theirs).

But now when I turn my television on, I am witnessing town hall meetings across the country whose "participants" are much, much more disruptive and unruly than Meyer ever imagined being. And many of them, I understand, don't even reside in the area where the politicians' districts/states are. Quite unlike Meyer who, as I said before, was a UF student.

As for the University of Florida incident, Andrew Meyer quietly waited for his opportunity to speak and only after he was standing at the microphone did he begin his (retrospectively quite humorous) ranting. But in these current town hall meetings, the politicians conducting them can barely hear themselves speak without hecklers, who are usually standing up en masse, yelling and gesturing. And these folks are angry, vicious, and aggressive.

There's nothing at all humorous about this. No, it's scary, not just for the politicians there but also for the legitimate citizens attending these meetings. The conduct of these disruptors of civic events is, in my opinion, much more deserving of police intervention than anything that Andrew Meyer unwittingly (or deliberately) concocted.

From what I have been able to gather, various right wing and Republican-backed special interest and lobbying groups have devised a strategy regarding the proposed health reform bill whereby its proponents in Congress, almost always Democrats, are to be hounded and harassed at their own town hall meetings, both to prevent them presenting their reasons for supporting health care reform as well as to give an impression in the media of a popular grassroots uprising against it. But I believe that this strategy has backfired. And the main reason for that is the loony-tune "birther" movement.

The "birthers", who believe and loudly proclaim that Barack Obama is not eligible to be president since he really wasn't born in the U.S.A. (all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding), brought organized town hall disruptive behavior to the national media's attention. So when the most recent wave of unruliness and harassment began, this time regarding health care reform, the only people fooled by it were the ones already opposed to health care reform.

The birthers are an example of a loose social/information feedback loop. They listen to the same radio talk shows (Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, Savage), watch Fox News because it's "fair and balanced" (i.e. reinforces their ideology), regularly consult the Drudge Report website for the latest "news", flood each other with paranoid e-mails, etc. It is easy for groups to spring up that have strange ideas with the communications networks that we have to today, along with the choices that their users can make to reinforce their own prejudices, fears, and ignorance while shutting out any contradictory input. The other day, I heard someone on C-Span refer to this kind of behavior as "cocooning". And I think this concerns both politically left and right-leaning groups.

Frankly, I think that anyone, regardless of their political leanings, who goes to these meetings and behaves in this undignified manner, while in reality just being a puppet on someone else's string, must be suffering from a terrible lack of self-esteem. They all look and sound like a bunch of damned fools to me!