Feeling the Rage in America

The Gringos Move to the Right

The BBC World this week published an interesting report entitled, “The United States lives rage on the right,” which references important data from a study describing how radical and intolerant groups have grown, constituted and organized themselves — including armed militias — already amounting to 127 different groups consisting of around 300,000 people.

The British agency’s report cites the study from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) whose director Mark Potok has just published, “Rage on the Right.” It highlights the wide range of radical groups that have multiplied in the country: hardline anti-immigrant groups, white supremacists militias, and fundamentalists. Pointed out as the most dangerous are the “anti-government patriots” that have grown 244 percent in the last year.

A black man in the White House wasn’t able to be swept under the rug in a country that experienced its own apartheid not very long ago when the Ku-Klux-Klan lit bonfires in front of African-American homes and lynched them while hiding under the cowardly costume that typified them and hid their identity. The heirs of this racial intolerance must be regrouping themselves in these militias, which are organizing to oppose all decisions that Obama’s dark establishment might address.

Neither does the SPLC study sweep to the side the immense discontent generated in the country’s middle class after the recent financial crisis which privileged banking interests and brought about bankruptcy for millions of affected Americans. Bush’s “rescue,” not believed to be worthwhile by Obama, has also contributed to the antipathy towards the government.

The economic situation has renewed old nationalists sentiments and awakened resentment against the immense mass of immigrants that populate all the states of the union. The native whites are resistant to the Latino, Arab, or Eastern European who occupies the job they once rejected but now need.

The BBC stated that, according to Mark Potok, it is significant that the first convention of nationalistic right-wing groups took place at the beginning of February at a meeting in Tennessee under the ironic name “Tea Party,” or in layman’s terms, the party of tea.

On his part, and in agreement with the study, those identified by Potol as the “new patriots” are self-defended armed groups consisting of white Anglo-Saxons or those of European origin, called — who knows by whom — to watch over the interests of their fair skin.

The report concludes with a little pearl: Sixty percent of the American population considers the country to be in decline. With things in such a state, rage growing and hate so similar to what we know in these parts, it is not surprising that right now the American Dream is beginning to seem more like a nightmare.