Nation's Liberals Suffering From Outrage Fatigue
WASHINGTON, DC-According to a study released Monday by the Hammond
Political Research Group, many of the nation's liberals are suffering
from a vastly diminished sense of outrage.
"With so many right-wing shams to choose from, it's simply too daunting
for the average, left-leaning citizen to maintain a sense of anger,"
said Rachel Neas, the study's director. "By our estimation, roughly 70
percent of liberals are experiencing some degree of lethargy resulting
from a glut of civil-liberties abuses, education funding cuts, and
exorbitant military expenditures."
San Francisco's Arthur Flauman is one liberal who has chosen to take a
hiatus from his seething rage over Bush Administration policies.
"Every day, my friends send me e-mails exposing Bush's corrupt
environmental policies," said Flauman, a member of both the Green Party
and the Sierra Club. "I used to spend close to an hour following all the
links, and I'd be shocked and outraged by the irreversible damage being
done to our land. At some point, though, I got annoyed with the
demanding tone of the e-mails. The Clear Skies Initiative is bogus, but
I'm not going to forward a six-page e-mail to all my friends-especially
one written by a man who signs his name 'Leaf.' Now, if a message's
subject line contains the word 'Bush,' it goes straight into the trash."
Neas found that many survey participants who attended protests against
the war in Iraq in 2003 could barely summon the energy to read newspaper
articles about the subject in 2004.
Portland, OR resident Suzanne Marshal compared herself to an addict,
needing increasingly large doses of perceived injustices to achieve a
state of anger.
"Even though I know how seriously messed-up the situation is in Iraq,
I've became inured to all but the most extreme levels of wrongdoing,"
Marshal said. "For months, no amount of civilian bombing could get me
mad. Then those amazing photos of the tortured Iraqi prisoners hit the
streets, and I got that old rush of overwhelming disgust with my
government. Then more photos came out, and more officials were
implicated, and now-I don't know. It's like a switch in my head turned
off again."
(THE ONION, 7/7/04)
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Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
