Bill Sparkman was a regular guy. Had a couple children, managed to get them grown up. Worked with the Boy Scouts, worked with kids as a substitute teacher. Also worked for the U.S. Census, probably to help make ends meet. He, unfortunately, also got cancer and fought for his life with regular doses of chemotherapy.
In between sessions of chemo, while working as a census taker near Big Creek, Kentucky, somebody savagely murdered him. Abducted him, gagged him, stripped him naked, bound his hands and feet and hanged his body from a tree. They also marked him, scrawling ‘fed’ across his body and taping his Census Bureau i.d. to his neck.
Immediately, anybody familiar with the hysterical screeching of the right-wing in the wake of the presidency’s changing hands cringed. Conservative paranoia about the census had been boiling for months.
Bachmann’s irrational diatribes about scary stalking Census workers quickly spawned a right-wing movement. During an interview with Bachmann, Fox News’ Glenn Beck said, “Ok, so let me talk about the Census because there’s a lot of people that are concerned with it because they don’t want to fill it out, they’re not comfortable with ACORN members coming to find out all this information, they don’t want to give the government all this kind of information.”
Conservative radio host Neal Boortz told a caller, “Most of the rest of the [Census] information is designed to help the government steal from you in order to pass off your property to the moochers. They’re looters.” Boortz urged his listeners to resist the Census workers. “If somebody comes to my — if a burglar came to your house, are you going to show him where the silverware is?” he asked. “Maybe you will if he pulls out a gun.”
The door-rapping ethnics of ACORN? Stealing? Burglars, guns? That sort of hideous vilification of the census and its workers alone qualifies you as whacko dirtbags. It’s required by the Constitution, jerks.
So now we have to come to grips with this murder, an absolutely shocking event, a nightmare. If it turns out to be the hysterical lashing out of an anti-government/census lunatic, it’d indicate the country has a bigger problem than we’d perhaps like to admit: political hysteria-speech affects ‘regular folks’, to the point of enabling, if not outright stoking, homicide.
And, well, don’t the same mindless Conservatives who run their neon-red-raged mouths know it? What was the response to the silence-of-the-lambs killing of an innocent, mild-mannered census worker? What were they immediately inspired to say? This: ‘You liberals are So Fucking Stupid, HAHA.’ [..more of this post..]
