Comment from RichyTea, and response

Take your Prozac!!

I think you forgot to take your medication before writing this article. Your insecurity and paranoia are quite evident by your 'interpretation' of the secret code. I do believe you should get out more often and breathe some fresh air.

RichyTea, Philadelphia, PA


*****

Well, if it weren't so much fun to respond to comments, I'd let this one, from the Herald Web site post of my column on Sarah Palin's evangelical code, speak for itself.

But honestly, I love getting these kinds of comments, especially when they only serve to prove my original points -- which, in this case, was that people would underestimate or dismiss the degree to which Sarah Palin's faith is likely to affect her governing.

Here RichyTea has offered a priceless example of exactly that.

And he's thrown in personal insults to boot, in lieu of facts to support the point I assume he has (perhaps that Sarah Palin isn't anyone to be afraid of, or that we can trust her to govern the country if she ended up being called on to do that).

As for my interpretation of the evangelical code, which I do admit (per your quotation marks) is an interpretation, I can only assume you are unfamiliar with evangelical subculture, RichyTea, or else that you are intimately familiar with it and do not consider it dangerous.

Also, as a brief aside, Prozac would usually be off-label for paranoia or insecurity. If you really believe I was making stuff up when I wrote about Christianese and how it functions in politics, you should've recommended something stronger, like lithium. Furthermore, if you believed I had a mental disorder, your suggestion to go out and get more fresh air would have been pretty laughable; mental disability is not cured by more walks in the park.

I feel silly parsing words so carefully here, RichyTea, but you've given me so little of substance to work with, I had to debunk the mental illness angle.

But I'm not schizophrenic, paranoid, or even insecure. As I believe I mentioned in my column, I'm an evangelical. And I'm worried and afraid, for what I think are valid reasons.

What do we know about Sarah Palin? We've had her in the public spotlight less than two months, not even long enough to let her hairstyle pass out of the news cycle into the "been done" bin.

What I've seen of her has been disappointing -- for me as a woman wishing to see a qualified, competent female leader able to articulate, say, a valid foreign policy (my deal-breaker issue, by the way) or to at least exhibit knowledge of the world around her -- and scary -- the videos of Palin speaking at church about God's will being done for an Alaskan pipeline to be built, or of her pastor praying against witchcraft with a certainty I find familiar and potentially dangerous.

The fact that I, hardly on the religious fringe of my denomination, kind of see her point with praying for what she wants done, or against bad influences, scares me. There are a lot of evangelicals out there nodding their heads at Sarah Palin thinking "she's a true believer, someone we can trust" right now. And they're likely to trust her blindly because of this, whatever her policy decisions; look at current President Bush's base of support despite what have now become wildly unpopular policies in the economy and in Iraq. I've heard more people than I'd care to remember protest that despite appearances, he must be making the right decisions, "because he's a man of God."

The fact that the media in general doesn't understand this scares me even more. I run into increasing numbers of Democrats just scratching their heads over Republican, particularly religious right, values, and unable to engage in a real discussion across the divide. My concern is that we're unable to listen to and understand each other, and may soon be unable to understand where decisions are coming from thanks to that.

It may be paranoid to believe that this kind of communication gap could end up leading to a political leader making religiously based decisions without accountability to the non-religious -- I hope it is -- but history proves that extreme conviction often precedes the impulse to make everyone else conform to those convictions, whether religious or otherwise. (The Salem witch trials and the Crusades come to mind; so does the 9/11 attack.)

Which is what I find ironic about your comment, RichyTea: It suggests that you know what it's all about, and that someone who disagrees (with whatever your interpretations are of Palin, her comments and convictions, or Scripture) is paranoid and insecure, and that you know just what would solve that problem.

I wish you'd mentioned your background in the comment. I would've liked to discuss the particulars of how our different backgrounds have informed our interpretations of the candidates and how and why they speak the way they do. That would have been an interesting discussion; it might have led to some actual dialogue on how we speak to each other and why.

As it is, I'm still glad to have gotten a comment -- even one as tailor-made to feed my "paranoia" as yours.