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The other day, I got a text from my uncle in California.
He’d just watched a news report about the tumultuous, March 18 town hall held by U.S. Rep. Mike Flood, a Republican, in which shouts and boos dominated.
“I thought Nebraskans were above this stuff,” texted my uncle, who grew up across the river in northwest Iowa.
Gotta admit, it wasn’t a great look for “Nebraska Nice.”
But also gotta admit, I wasn’t surprised — it wasn’t the first time I’d seen an angry crowd in Nebraska confront a politician about their positions.
Back in the day, they yelled at then U.S. Sen. Ben Nelson, a Democrat, about his decisive vote to approve the Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare,” that expanded health care to more Americans.
Later, it was then U.S. Rep. Jeff Fortenberry who got the wrath of a larger gathering at Lincoln Southwest High School over his support for dismantling the ACA.
We all saw what happened on Jan. 6. More recently, we saw supporters of abortion and LGBTQ rights noisily flood into the Rotunda of the State Capitol while state lawmakers debated legislation dealing with those issues. A couple of disruptive people had to be arrested and hauled away. And we saw at least two people openly carrying a handgun (open carry is permitted at the State Capitol despite efforts to disallow that. Carrying a gun to a raucous event where emotions are heated is not a good idea, if you ask me.)
Many people are just angry, I told my uncle, and those people are on both sides of the political aisle.
Democrats are upset that an unelected band of 20-somethings, led by billionaire Elon Musk, are hacking away at federal programs that haven’t faced such a hacking in decades. It creates worries about services for veterans, research into cancer and other diseases, and whether Social Security and Medicare will survive.
Republicans, who took over the White House and both houses of Congress, appear upset that everyone isn’t jumping onboard the efforts to impose tariffs on foreign goods, annex Greenland and Canada, and the efforts to cut spending. They’re also a bit defensive that inflation, interest rates and the price of eggs haven’t fallen as promised on “day one.”
When you see talking heads on the 24/7 news channels constantly yelling and ranting about today’s world, and the leader of the free world calling our allies derogatory names and tossing them out of the White House, well that tends to signal that it’s OK to be rude and crude.
Social media is likely also a factor. We can spout off against someone without confronting them faceto- face. It’s much easier to be offensive.
I pine for the days when our leaders professed that “I cannot tell a lie.” But even back then there were violent disagreements, sometimes resolved by dueling pistols.
Flood, for his part, should be given credit for holding a town hall with a live audience when Republican leaders were discouraging that.
He said that there’s some value in allowing people to speak their mind. And he did get applause for his support of freedom fighters in Ukraine.
People don’t like change, Flood said. And some of the changes we’re seeing are pretty radical, like erasing (even briefly) the military history of Jackie Robinson, who broke the color barrier in baseball, and taking down the story of the Enola Gay, a bomber built at Offutt that delivered the first atomic bomb.
Is there a solution to all this anger? I read somewhere that we should take a 30-second timeout before reacting to a provocation, take some deep breaths, do something calming, like pet a cat. Emotions dissipate after 90 seconds, they say.
Turn off the TV, step away from social media, dig around in the garden. Or as the Bible says, turn the other cheek.
Maybe, like a lot of things, this is just a temporary cycle that will pass. We can only hope.
Paul Hammel has covered state government and the state for decades. He retired last year as senior contributor with the Nebraska Examiner. He was previously with the Omaha World-Herald, Lincoln Journal Star and Omaha Sun.
