In "Red States" Mourning and Delusion Continue

P. S. I forgot to mention that, as noted in a prior post, Tennessee ranks among the ten states with the least educated population.  Maybe that explains Ms. Cox's shock over the election results.

It will be interesting to see whether or not the 2012 election results will finally burst the bubble in which so many Republicans live - especially in deep "red states" where Republicans and conservatives just cannot grasp that the country and the world are changing and the 1950's are truly gone forever.   One would think with all the various media outlets available these folks could turn the dial from Fox News at least once in a while.  But, I guess that would involve thinking and trying to educate one's self - thinks that the GOP and the Christofascists seek to avoid at all cost.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the election aftermath in the la la land that has come to be the GOP's alternate reality.  Here are highlights:

HENDERSONVILLE, Tenn. — She arrived early to take apart the campaign office piece by piece, just as she felt so many other things about her life were being dismantled. Beth Cox wore a Mitt Romney T-shirt, a cross around her neck and fresh eyeliner, even though she had been crying on and off and knew her makeup was likely to run. A day after the election, she tuned the radio to Glenn Beck and began pulling posters and American flags off the wall.

Here in the heart of Red America, Cox and many others spent last week grieving not only for themselves and their candidate but also for a country they now believe has gone wildly off track. The days after Barack Obama’s reelection gave birth to a saying in Central Tennessee: Once was a slip, but twice is a sign. 

If, as Obama likes to say, the country has decided to “move forward,” it has also decided to move further away from the values and beliefs of a state where Romney won 60 percent of the vote, a county where he won 70 percent, and a town where he won nearly 80. 

[I]n a single election night, parts of her [Cox's] country had legalized marijuana, approved gay marriage and resoundingly reelected a president who she worried would “accelerate our decline.”  .  .  .   .   “I just don’t get it,” the county sheriff said.

Romney’s thorough defeat had come more as a shock than as a disappointment, and now Cox stared at the actual results on her computer and tried to imagine what the majority of her country believed. “Virginia went blue? Really?” she said. “Southern-values Virginia?”

She blamed some of the divisiveness on Republicans. The party had gotten “way too white,” she said, and she hoped it would never again run a presidential ticket without including a woman or a minority. The tea party was an extremist movement that needed to be “neutralized,” she said, and Romney’s campaign had suffered irreparable damage when high-profile Republicans spoke about “crazy immigration talk and legitimate rape.”

But many other aspects of the division seemed fundamental and harder to solve.  .   .   .   . 

There was the America of gay marriage and the America of her Southern Baptist church, where 7,000 came to listen on Sundays, and where church literature described marriage as “the uniting of one man and one woman.”

Later that night, she left her two-story house in the suburbs and headed to a church a mile outside of town. It was her place of comfort — the place where she always found an answer. She drove onto the church’s sprawling campus, past the children’s center, the volleyball courts and techno-lit recreation room for teenagers and parked in front of a small building. Then she walked up to the second floor to lead her weekly prayer group of 25 women. 

Not to sound cruel, but perhaps Ms. Cox needs to spend less time at her Church - a Southern Baptist Church, of course -  open her eyes, maybe even travel to large Northeast cities, and stop drinking the GO/Southern Baptist Kool-Aid.  Indeed, start thinking for herself and embracing knowledge rather than the intellectual gruel that are the staple of the Christianists and the GOP which they have now overrun.  As citizens, we have a duty to educate ourselves and not live in a bubble.  Yes, it is scary stuff for folks like Ms. Cox - especially the thinking part - but it needs to be done.  And maybe in the process Ms. Cox would come to grasp that all of us are fully human whether we are black or white, gay or straight, Christian or non-Christian.