I recently received a very disappointing phone call from a woman with an adult son with special needs who lives at home with her. Because of her advocacy for her son over the years, she has become involved with numerous statewide committees and advisory groups dealing with funding programs for housing and services for people with mental and physical disabilities. And since I work in that field, our conversation turned to the cuts to those programs that have occurred over the past several years, and that continue to occur.
She asked me several times who was responsible for the cuts and since I couldn’t help but assume that she knew as well as I the group that was responsible, I responded generically that it was the fault of politicians. Then she said something that made me understand where she was coming from. She asked me if I knew Nancy Pelois’s salary as speaker of the house, and before I could respond she told me it was $250,000 I believe she said. She went on to say that perhaps Ms. Pelosi should consider donating this amount to the programs benefiting people with disabilities that had been cut so extensively in recent years. Now I’m not sure about the salary of the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, but the figure she mentioned sounded plausible, but I am sure that the Speaker is no longer Nancy Pelosi, so I commented that perhaps John Boehner might consider the same thing. She mumbled something about his salary not being that much.
So then I got it. Like so many other people I’ve talked to in recent years, she was determined to blame Democrats for cuts in government programs and assistance that negatively affected her and her loved ones. Evidently she has decided to be a Republican, and is prepared to ignore reality in order to justify the decision to herself.
Cognitive dissonance this condition is called, and it appears in surprising places. My own mother, who is not in good health and relies on Medicare and Social Security to survive, seems to be firmly convinced that President Obama is determined to do away with both programs and only the Republicans stand in his way. She’ll say with great sincerity, “I just pray they don’t let him get away with it.” With “they” referring to the Republicans he battles on a daily basis to save these and other public programs on which the poor, the elderly, and the disabled depend for their very lives. I sometimes point out to her that she was a Democrat until recent years, and she used to know that that this was the party that created and defended these programs from the Republicans. But my comments make no difference, her mind has become locked into a permanent state of dissonance. Like my friend with the disabled child, my mother believes what she wants to believe, and nothing I can say will change that.
And the reason for this? Part of it is surely the ability and willingness of Republicans to lie convincingly about their motives and actions, along with their substantial financial resources that they are more than willing to expend in the effort. But to succeed, lies require a gullible and often willing audience, and if racism is introduced into the mix, then the capacity for seeing reality not as it is, but as they want it to be, is increased exponentially. It’s an unfortunate partnership of deceivers and those that want to be deceived, and the price is being paid by the ones least able to afford it.
There are no morals more relative than conservative morals, and no hypocrisy quite like conservative hypocrisy.
