"I want my country back!"

When I was about 30, my brother and I were pawing through dusty cardboard boxes our grandparents had left to my father, and we came across a photograph of our grandfather in a KKK sheet. Astonished we approached our father, who told us that his dad had heard that the KKK served free beer, so he had joined. No beer materialized, so the misinformed Cal Goss had dropped out after one year.

These events had taken place somewhere near Sanger in the Big Valley more than 100 years ago.

Recently, while I was watching an obviously misinformed woman in a spotted house dress sobbing hysterically at a town forum on TV, saying, "I want my country back," I thought of my grandpa. What the woman meant was that she wanted her white male country back. She was totally scared. Suddenly her straight white country had a Black President, a sharp-tongued woman in a suit as secretary of state, a stout Latina on the Supreme Court, and grey-haired gays in the Episcopal establishment. This could not, from her perspective, be America.

Of course the tea-baggers and birthers contain many fake members of the working class, Republican functionaries who found some bib overalls at Goodwill and attend public meetings pretending that their soft hands are the hands of hard workers. But there are also genuinely terrified haters in the mix, not descendents of the Nazi party but descendents of the Whiskey Rebellion, the vigilantes, the lynch mobs, the KKK, the Know Nothings. They are part of us. They have always been with us, and we owe them something: an attempt to calm them down and convince them that they are not in danger.

The Republicans, who manipulate and use these terrified people, deserve to drop out of history and be replaced by an honest conservative party that is dedicated to conserving what is best in our country. No true conservative encourages mob rule--the idea is ridiculous.