Dirty fighting in the home of the brave

When I was a little boy, my mother talked to me about fighting. She knew that sometimes boys got into fights. What she told me more than once was, “Don’t fight dirty.” In addition she would say, “No hitting below the belt.” In other words, it was wrong to kick someone in the crotch for any reason, least of all to win a fight. It was wrong to fight dirty.

In a comment to my previous post, my friend James embedded a link to this Newsweek article about the so-called health care debate. Author Sharon Begley states:

As politicians and strategists (at least the successful ones) have finally learned, appeals to emotion leave appeals to logic in the dust. And no emotion moves people more powerfully than fear.

The body of the article lays out how the general and field officers of the opposition to President Obama’s health care reform are using psychological weapons to fan the flames of what the Buddha referred to as the three fires of greed, hatred, and delusion. The article gives several examples of what many of us already know: There is a lot of dirty fighting in this ideological battle, and it is very one-sided.

The politicians and strategists in question, of course, are equally deluded as they are equally filled with greed and hatred – just as all of us are to one degree or another. But there is something fundamentally wrong with a system where people in leadership roles in the United States can intentionally mislead people down a path to deeper delusion, increasing greed, and deeper hatred.

Not very good leadership, if you ask me. Effective, maybe, but not good. But the purpose is winning. And, for some, the only way to win is to fight dirty. History is filled with examples of dirty-fighting leaders. But mangling history – for example, equating Obama with Hitler – is just another weapon handed to the deluded protester just as rifle is handed to the hapless infantryman. Both go off to the front lines to do the dirty work of the rich and powerful.