Some way to ‘take a stand’

I’ve always been a huge supporter of taking a stand, of speaking out against the status quo, of not being afraid to speak your own mind. Much of the greatest music you’ll find stems from people who have experienced oppression and suffering and people who speak out against atrocities and injustice.

Somali rapper K’naan has made some of the best music I’ve heard in the last few years, speaking against injustice, poverty and war while simultaneously giving me hope that there’s more life left in hip-hop than Supermanin’ hoes and singing for the shorties.

Before U2 became corporate shills and tax evaders, selling iPods (as though iPods needed their endorsement to make it), and singing about getting boots on, they actually made music about injustice.

Bruce Springsteen has made a career out of being a voice for the working class, and Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son,” despite being played at sporting events and Fourth of July fireworks displays, is one of the most blunt rejections of blind patriotism in all of rock ‘n’ roll.

However, there are certain situations in which those who think they’re standing up against oppression or injustice are doing anything but. And the recent actions by Gary Stein, a marine staff sergeant and primary organizer of the Armed Forces Tea Party Patriots, a person who seeks to “stand up on the very soil we defended to preserve common-sense conservatism and defend our Constitution that is threatened by a tyrannical government” are anything but exemplary.

There is nothing in the Constitution that articulates that the military must protect “common-sense conservatism.” Despite what Stein might think, his “stand” against tyrannical government is not the same as those of the soldiers who refused to fight because they don’t support war.

And Stein, just like the Tea Party members who seek to form militias to protect states’ rights from the federal government, has clearly chosen to follow the words of demagogues like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh instead of reason. Barack Obama isn’t asking Marines to wage war against U.S. citizens, and the federal government isn’t marching on Oklahoma to make sure its citizens have access to health care (the horror).

People like Stein will blindly march to war against nations of brown people and murder women, children and reporters if they might potentially be a threat, and I’m supposed to believe they are true defenders of freedom from tyrannical government?

Or is it merely the election of a black president that bothers them? Because I have yet to meet a true liberal who has been particularly impressed with Obama’s record.

As a president who has continued many of President Bush’s policies regarding various military and international issues — and, like Ronald Reagan, seeks to reduce nuclear weapons — I fail to see how President Obama has made the federal government tyrannical. If health care reform is the best example you have of “oppression,” then you have nothing to stand on. And as such, perhaps someone should tell the Marine Tea Party group, “Get back in line, maggot, and when we need you to think, we’ll tell you.”


E-mail: mrstraw@indiana.edu