Oh sure, it's been a long, hot summer and the kids are getting ready to go back to school but, fortunately, we've had the cool, calm and collected health care debate to refresh us.

And that logical and extensively researched public discourse has given those opposed to the current administration every opportunity to point out flaws in that administration in a reasoned and responsible way.

Witness the blog post of one Kristen Atkinson this week on the comedy website, TownHall.com, a haven for studied and even-handed commentary.

Ms. Atkinson, it seems, felt compelled to tell the world about the witchcraft currently being practiced, she said, in the White House.

That's right: witchcraft.

At least, she called it witchcraft. What she wrote was that the First Grandmother, Ms. Marian Robinson, mother of First Lady Michelle Obama, was practicing Santeria…or, maybe voodoo, she wasn't precise on that point. In any case, wrote the TownHall blogger, it's "Afro-Hispanic" witchcraft and it's happening right there IN the White House!

"The Obama White House is abuzz with talk of witchcraft by first grandmother, 72-year-old Marian Robinson, who lives in the White House residence," wrote the blogger. "A close friend of Michelle Obama says the president is furious at his mother-in-law after learning that she was practicing Santeria, an African spirit cult, in the White House."

Never mind all the numerous reports of no less than Nancy Reagen herself consulting an astrologer in the White House or various and sundry reports of séances over the years to expunge the ghosts of presidents past, this involves chicken bones and strange words and black people and, well, we can't have it! According to blogger Atkinson.

Oh, by the way, the White House adamantly denies any such thing is taking place. No witchcraft, no voodoo, no Santeria.

"Radical orthodox emergent Christianity, sure. Muslim-Socialist-Fascist yoga, without a doubt. Hindu haikus with Transcendental Meditation and crypto-Zen Zoroastrianism, you bet. Classical music, all the time," said the White House. "But no witchcraft."

Okay, just made up that last part. But let's be clear: Santeria and voodoo are not witchcraft.

Called on her bovine excretion by the authoritative and rigid news source, Wonkette (www.wonkette.com), Ms. Atkinson bristled at the active resentment of her worldview.

"After 8 years of a president sent by God to lead the American people and rescue us from the horrors of 911 and Islamo-fascists, it now boils down to this? How incredibly tragic. You folks don't really seem to understand the extreme peril that our nation confronts. Stop making fun of me. Take off your blinders! Wake up!" she wrote to the Wonkette editors.

Who says journalism as a craft is going the way of stone masonry?

Lost amid the din of screaming and corporatist-stoked extreme paranoia expressed in the hyperbolic chambers of public meetings this August is a serious medical malady sweeping the nation.

In what may be the greatest irony of 2009, it appears many national decision makers, opinion leaders and certainly the national press are falling victim to what the National Centers of Disease Control has called Weak Underpants & Spine Syndrome or WUSS for short.

The CDC has recorded a burgeoning WUSS problem among members of Congress and even the Obama Administration. It may become our single biggest health care concern, threatening even to overwhelm and reduce to meaningless numbers the nearly 47 million Americans who can not afford health care at all.

Symptoms of WUSS include but are not limited to:

    • Recoiling in fear when called names in a public setting.

    • Stammering incoherently when presented with rash and unfounded hysteria.

    • Reaching immediately for one's Blackberry to email staff members with instructions to rework
      previous statements of support for health care reform.

    • Hastily retreating from public meetings, ashen and shaken, wondering aloud if insurance
      companies will pour millions into the campaigns of future election opponents.

These and other symptoms of WUSS may be leading national decision-makers and policy advocates to simply roll over in their sleep and receive, without complaint, health industry enemas which will leave them inert and unable to adequately respond to a major problem among the populace.

Members of the press corps and national news organizations appear also to be falling victim, in increasing numbers, to WUSS. Symptoms for this type of sufferer include reporting as fact gross distortions and flat out lies perpetrated by vested interests and repeated blindly by ignorant sycophants and, even, freely giving a national megaphone to the clearly inept and ignorant.

The symptoms of WUSS appear even more acute when victims are confronted with shear insanity. Unable, apparently, to mentally separate psychotic hysteria from rational debate WUSS sufferers may begin to actually believe lies spread upon public discourse by ideologues bent on wrecking havoc and by insurance companies committed to retaining enormous profits on the backs of WUSS sufferers' constituents.

But there is hope.

Together with a good diet, regular exercise, avoidance of the Faux News Channel, a new drug therapy developed by a consortium of rational thinkers offers some much needed courage and fortitude to lawmakers and reporters alike.

The drug, Groapair, when combined with deep meditation, good nutrition and a walk around the block has shown promise in helping decision-makers remember why they were elected in the first place; why the American people voted in November, 2008 for a substantial change of direction and why, in the final analysis, a massive correction is needed for a health care system run amok in profits and lack of adequate care.

Congressman Barney Frank, D-Massachusetts and Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, showed what can happen when lawmakers stand firm in the face of teabagging.

Frank was asked the following question about health care reform at a recent town hall meeting: "Why do you continue to support a Nazi policy, as Obama has continued to support this policy?"

Never a shrinking violet, the veteran Congressman responded: "When you ask me this question, I'm going to revert to my ethnic heritage and respond by asking you a question: On what planet do you spend most of your time?

"As you stand there with a picture of the president defaced to look like Hitler and compare the effort to increase health care to the Nazis, my answer to you is…it is a tribute to the First Amendment that such vile, contemptible nonsense is so freely propagated. Ma'am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to debate a dining room table. I have no interest in doing it."

WUSS sufferers could stand to take seriously the example set by Congressman Frank.

The family hunkered down in the center hallway of their home.

It wasn't quiet there but they thought it the safest place.

The roar of the wind outside was so deafening it reached into the center of their ears. It was a roar that would not case until daylight.

But daylight would bring its own problems.

The radio cracked faintly.

The family tried desperately to hold on to the signal, their only link to the world outside the maelstrom. Talk on the radio helped keep the family's terror at a low simmer.

A full-blown hurricane, winds over 100 mph was making landfall.

The family's home was on a slight hill so they were not worried about flooding. But that was the only part of the storm that was not terrifying.

"I'm scared," the boy said as his father directed the family flashlight in his direction. "I don't want our house to blow away."

"Don't worry, son," said the father. "We'll be fine. The house isn't going anywhere."

Deep inside, he was not certain.

The sturdy brick home swayed, creaked and moaned under the intense pressure of the storm.

The outer edges of the hurricane's fierce winds arrived about mid-afternoon. A stiff breeze from the southwest provided to be only a harbinger of the wall of wind and rain that would arrive by dusk.

The threatening dark clouds raced overhead, surreal, like movie special effects.

It was no movie. It was the terror of raw natural energy, strengthened by its own centrifugal force and unleashed with nothing to choke it.

Electrical power to the family's home was lost just before the darkness fell. They telephone went out. Except for the nervous radio chatter, the family was isolated from the rest of the world by the wall of roaring wind outside.

The darkness was bad enough but the constant and overwhelming roar of the wind worked the human psyche into a frenzy.

The dropping air pressure squeezed brows, eyes and ears like a vice. Father opened the hall door and crept on is knees for a peek outside. The solitary beam of his flashlight revealed a violent and wet cauldron. It was not raining so much as water was flying in every direction.

Father thought he was looking at a terrarium in a blender.

He pointed the beam up the tall pine trees that dotted the yard. But the trees were tall no longer. They were bent and broken at mid-trunk. One was swaying back and forth, its trunk perpendicular to the ground. Pine needles were driven into the tree trunks like nails hammered into a wall.

A loud crash jolted the entire house as the broken end of a thick pine tree limb shattered the living room ceiling. Water poured in. there was nothing that could be done. Father sat helpless as rain soaked the living room.

The family managed a couple of hours of sleep in the early morning but it was restless sleep, induced by sheer exhaustion.

By daylight, the storm moved on.

Neighbors stumbled like zombies from their homes in the early morning light. Their eyes fell on massive devastation. Shock set in. the once green and lush neighborhood was flattened in naked ruin. Felled trees were smashed across cars and houses like spaghetti. Leaves and small branches were plastered against buildings. The quiet was eerie.

It would be two months before the community returned to normal, or what resembled normal. It would never again be the way it was before the storm.

Hurricanes are like that. They change people and communities forever.

Anger and its brother, hate, are usually the result of fear and fear is the essence of self-indulgence, self-centeredness.

Some forms of fear are useful. We don't throw ourselves onto a burning fire for fear of being burned. Most of us tend to run away from snakes. Most of us try not to harm ourselves for fear of pain. It's self-preservation but in its purest form also self-centered, rooted in Freud's ego.

But if we fear pain why do we indulge ourselves in the pain of anger?

Been thinking about this quite a bit, lately, watching some of our fellow Americans react in violent and angry outrage over a debatable point of public policy.

It's clear the anger, the violent outbursts – some to the point of physical confrontation, vandalism, a display of weapons – are all rooted in this self-centered fear.

There is a spiritual axiom which suggests if I am upset or angry or hate-filled there is something inside of me that is not quite right. If I am upset or angry or resentful there is something wrong with ME. That "something wrong" part about ME usually means:

     a.)    I'm afraid of losing something I have.
     b.)    I'm afraid of not getting something I want; or
     c.)    I'm afraid people will not/are not acting the way I think they should.

Notice all the "I" part of that; the ME. I want. I have. I think they should. And, of course, all rooted in fear.

It's been true over the centuries when people are persecuted by hate it has always been the result of self-centered fear; usually the same three fears: losing, not getting, not acting right.

It is helpful, then, to understand how easily fear can be set ablaze to hate and anger by only a single match: the very public turn of phrase, say, of a demagogue or even one considered a leader by some. When those phrases and declarations become ubiquitous, even more voices are raised in cacophonous echo because in them is found comfort and, even, justification of fear; even if the fear itself is not fully realized.

When a woman at a town hall meeting angrily screams, "I want my country back," she is not expressing the justifiable outrage of Native Americans, she is really saying she's afraid. She's afraid of losing something she has or of not getting something she wants or she's afraid of the actions of others might lead to one or both of the first two. She can't express that fear so concretely because she probably can't even articulate so precisely her fear. But it is fear nonetheless and it's been torched into anger.

The fear may be unfounded – often is – or irrational but it exists in the mind just the same.

When fear is turned to anger and used by political extremists as a tool for derailing public discourse it serves only to dampen or destroy what could be good and useful public discourse.

But, then again, turning fear into anger is usually the only tool available to political extremists because useful contributions and genuinely good ideas would be welcomed into the center of public discourse. Reason, wisdom and persuasion stand in the center of public discourse. Fear, anger & hate can only shout shrill from the outside.

The progress of public discourse, certainly in a participatory democracy, depends upon the individual becoming part of the collective, identifying with and possessing a piece of the greater good. Fear, anger & hate – self-centeredness – keeps us outside.