The fury of the storm

It's Good Friday, and there's a windstorm brewing outside my window. It seems appropriate for the day, somehow, the fury of the wind, the moaning and the whistling, the thump and clatter of branches and other detritus on the deck.

I drove into Seattle this morning to renew my passport for an upcoming visit to Canada, and the driving wind and rain made it almost impossible to open my car door on the ferry. There are fewer people in the city today -- Good Friday and spring break are coinciding for many this year -- and those who are out and about have their heads down and their umbrellas thrust forward; just trying to get to where they need to go without being blown away.

There's something a bit hellish about it all; a sort of every-man-for-himself feeling, each of us in separate worlds, obsessed with survival -- which is how most of us get when we're feeling under siege. And in it, I hear echoes of the bizarre and venomous rage that people seem to be feeling about the passing of the health care bill. Why such intensity? I wonder.

A friend sent me a link to an op-ed piece in the New York Times, which offers an answer to the question. The author of the article, Frank Rich, compares the disproportionate fury about the health care bill to the reaction, back in 1964, to the passing of the Civil Rights Amendment, and suggests that the rise in right-wing extremism is not about health care, but in reality a reaction to some serious demographic shifts in our country's population. "The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play." By 2012, he adds, "non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority." He then notes, "The Tea Party movement is virtually all white."

So here it is, Good Friday, and the shadows of extremism are darkening, clouds are looming, storms are brewing. Surely we are all desperate for the message of hope that Easter will bring. Perhaps when we put our heads down against the storm we are really bowing them in prayer.