Who’s got the death panels now, GOP?

By Tonyaa Weathersbee
Guest Columnist

So, who’s for death panels now?

During September 12’s CNN/Tea Party-sponsored Republican presidential debate in Tampa, Florida, some folks from the party that claims to support the sanctity of life screamed “Yeah!” when Ron Paul was asked, hypothetically, whether it was okay to allow a comatose 30-year-old man to die for neglecting to buy health insurance.

Yet their hypocrisy and callousness wasn’t as galling and primitive as was the Texas Congressman’s answer. Basically, he said, churches and charities ought to pick up the tab, not the government.

Still, that episode ought to go a long way toward revealing the Tea Party’s true agenda, an agenda guided by ignorance and racial resentment.

The ignorance comes from those who seriously believe that a church or charity can pay thousands of dollars a month in medical costs to keep one person alive. Some insured people, in fact, wind up holding bake sales and begging for donations to cover the costs of catastrophic care when their insurance can’t pick up the slack.

A lot of times, they can’t make it work.

But it seems that all this noise about forcing the needy to depend on the goodwill of do-gooders instead of government has been escalating since the Clinton years – and it’s grown louder since the nation elected its first Black president.

It was in the 1990s when Fox News and conservative talk radio hosts began to carve a niche in recasting history and misrepresenting reality. They began to paint the 1960s Great Society programs as failures that led to welfare dependency, crime and every other ill afflicting the country – ills which Black people tend to be stereotyped with.

Yet, according to research by Joseph A. Califano Jr., former secretary of the old Department of Health, Education and Welfare, those programs led to progress for the nation. For example, by the time their impact began to be felt in the 1970s, the poverty rate for everyone dropped from 22.2 percent to 12.6 percent.

Even now, as the economic downturn has plunged 15.1 percent of Americans into poverty, it’s still not as high as it was before welfare and other safety nets were established.

But the thing that probably is causing Tea Partiers to pine for the pre-Great Society days is the fact that other government-inspired changes have also worked to bolster Black people and other minorities who they feel threatened by.

Such measures include things such as Pell grants and college aid, the concept of affirmative action and legislative advancements such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Those measures made the rise of President Barack Obama, who depended on student loans and other help to get through college, possible.

And the Tea Partiers are so resentful at having a Black president that they now, under the guise of constitutional purity and personal responsibility, want to extinguish any government help that could, heaven forbid, nurture another minority who might rise to heights that threaten their illusions of privilege.