Love for Slavery?

Through Deep Red Glasses

   Online newspaper comment by "Jean" in a deep red state:

• "The Tea Party isn't going away, any more than the slave engineers aka Democrats. The former are members of the party that freed the slaves, while the latter are the party who brought the slaves to this country and then treated them worse than cattle. But some people in this country today continue to enjoy that enslavement and show their love of that wrong by continuing to vote their slavers back into power.
  
  "I will say it again: If Obama Care is so great, terrific for you and me, then why isn't it the same for Obama and the Democrats? Get the cobwebs out of your head and think about that one for a while."
  
  The statements by Jean were posted immediately after the vote in Washington, D.C. to reopen government. They carry important warnings for everyone who has hope of restoring sanity in Congress and in state governments: The extremists will never be influenced by facts. Or, as was stated long ago, "You cannot reason prejudice out of a person; it wasn't reason that put it there."
  
  Defying all reason, Jean thinks that people who receive any form of government assistance do so because they are lazy and irresponsible, and to her this is just another way of defining slavery. Remember Mitt Romney's statement that he could not make "the 47 percent take responsibility for themselves?"
  
  And I wonder, has anyone ever explained to the Jeans of our nation that the Affordable Care Act, in the form of state exchanges, simply provides access to insurance for those who do not already have coverage? She thinks that government employees, whose health insurance with private companies is jointly funded by the employer and the employees, should be forced to drop that coverage and use the exchanges to seek individual policies. But she does not want to apply that rule to her own employer-assisted policy.
  
  In short, she does not think. She merely reacts to what she hears.
  
  You and I have two responsibilities toward the "Jeans" among us. The first responsibility is to make it publicly known that we disagree with them. If we let politeness prevent us from speaking out, Jean's neighbors will assume that she is right because they hear nothing else. The "herd instinct" will influence their opinions and their votes. That's why the red states--which are largely the Deep South--are so deeply red.
  
  Our second responsibility is to tell the inactive and the uninformed among us, especially the "47 percent," the truth about the harm they are suffering at the hands of the extreme conservatives. We must get them to register and vote. If we fail to do this, the extremists will win next year's elections.