Wishes are Horses

Wishes are horses. All you have to do is give a few speeches saying you want peace, and you will ride like a king. You don't actually have to do anything to win the Nobel Peace Prize. And when you actually do something to bring about peace--you know, like Ronald Reagan negotiating peace with the Soviet Union at Reykjavik--there is no prize. Thank God Reagan knew that the real prize was actual peace.

All you have to do is run around the world telling people how bad America is and how you are going to make everything better, and someone in Oslo will hand you a check for a cool 1.4 million dollars. You can get a pretty nice horse for that kind of money. That's for sure!

But let's not give peace prizes to people who actually bring peace, people like the men and women working to reconcile the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda. Or like the man who has made it his life's work to build schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan. That is real work, resulting in real peace. And these are people who could actually use 1.4 million dollars.

What is President Obama going to do with his 1.4 million? Is he going to pay back the U.S. government for the money he spent flying around the world in Air Force One? Is he going to spend that money planting trees to offset his growing carbon footprint? How does he use that money to promote the "work" he is doing? Greg Mortenson, of the Central Asia Institute, could build a lot of schools for that kind of money. Christophe Mbonyibango, could do so much toward reconciliation in Rwanda with that kind of cash. It is a testimony to the greatness of these men that they do not pay attention to things like Nobel Peace prizes. They are too busy making the world a better place to live.

The prophet Isaiah said, "Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness; Who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!" Woe to a world where beggars ride and those who have earned their horses walk.

I say, "Whoa!" to the horses that beggars have mounted. Throw off your wishful riders!

Lessons from the Van Jones Resignation

It strikes me that we all have something to learn from the events that led to Van Jones' resignation. In the heat of our passions, we must exercise great discretion in the words we choose. Our words, for better or worse, will come back to haunt us.

It wasn't that long ago that it made rhetorical sense to tailor speeches to specific audiences. Van Jones was speaking to sympathetic audiences when he made the statements that eventually brought him down. But we no longer have isolated audiences. With modern technology, especially the ubiquitous cell phone, everything we say can be recorded and tucked away for dissemination at a kairotic moment, a moment when either our friends or our enemies can make good use of our words.

In some ways, I feel badly for Jones. He appears to be a man who strongly believes the things he says. He may be completely sincere in his motives. I think he just has no idea how far outside the mainstream his ideas really are.

As I've watched the various clips from speeches and interviews, I wondered what I've said that could come back to bite me. Not much of what I've written or said is published, but what have I said in chat rooms and in the comment sections for various news articles or video clips? I don't use my full name, but my e-mail address is there in cyberspace somewhere. I'm sure that someone has the technology to find my comments.

People should take strong stands on important matters. But taking a strong position doesn't require radical accusations, crude language, or the mocking of others. We should first be well informed, and then we should speak reasonably and articulately.

There isn't much I can do to change what I have said up till now, but I can certainly keep a tighter control on what I say and write in the future.

Straw Men Are Easy to Burn

I'd like to start a running post of straw man arguments and other fallacies made by the proponents of universal health care. If you catch any, please send them along. I'll add them to the list and credit you. If you think I've misidentified a fallacy, let me know that as well.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the straw man fallacy, here is a quick definition: The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person's actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position. This sort of "reasoning" is fallacious because attacking a distorted version of a position simply does not constitute an attack on the position itself. (from the Nizkor Project: http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/straw-man.html)

1. Proponents of universal healthcare are discussing how well medicare works, how it doesn't have "death panels", etc. Well, how is that relevant? We are not opposing medicare per say; we are opposing H.R. 3200. Does Medicare have the exact same language in it as H.R. 3200? Why are the Democrats not discussing the actually language of the bill before us? This argument falls under other fallacies as well. Red Herring comes to mind.
2. I'm not sure this is straw man: The many elderly people who are against the healthcare bill don't understand that Medicare is a government funded program. I've heard one anecdote of an elderly person saying, "The government better keep its hands off my medicare." I've heard it repeated twice. The argument says that the people who are against government-run health care not only have it already but really like it. If they only understood this, they would not oppose President Obama's plan. So. How many elderly people actually don't understand that their Medicare benefits are government funded? Can elderly people not understand the differences between Medicare as it stands today and the government-run health option that Obama proposes. I give them a lot more credit than that. Besides the whole argument being a fallacy, it is also a prime example of youthful arrogance.
   

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Why are pundits and politicians still debating the reasons for the President’s failure to sell his healthcare plan? They have all sorts of opinions: he misjudged the people’s estimation of the current healthcare system; he wrongfully construed his popularity as a mandate for a massive overhaul of the system; the Republican party is organizing to destroy the President. But no one is stating the obvious. The reason people are turning out in droves at town hall meetings and T.E.A. Parties is because they are angry. They want and deserve respect, and they aren’t getting it from the White House, Congress or the media.

People get angry for three main reasons: 1) they don’t think they are being respected, 2) they don’t think they are being listened to, and 3) they feel powerless. Look at what’s been going on for the past few months. People were already exasperated before the healthcare discussion began. The President and Congress, and the Bush administration before them, had already rammed through several very costly bills and a takeover of GM, sometimes acting in the dead of night and always with precious little transparency. Citizens responded by holding T.E.A. Parties.

And how did our government and our media respond to a very American show of exasperation? Well, President Obama mocked them. At a town hall meeting in Missouri, he sneered, “When you see, you know, those of you who are watching certain news channels which are not very popular, and you see folks waving tea bags around, let me just remind them that I am happy to have a serious conversation about how we are going to cut our health care costs down over the long term.” It was stunning: The President of the United States of America was mocking his own citizens! Not very respectful.

Speaker Pelosi dismissed the T.E.A. Party uprising as “astroturf”. She said, “This initiative is funded by the high end — we call it astroturf. It’s not really a grassroots movement.” She invoked the “astroturf” word again in her dismissal of citizens protesting the healthcare bill. Ironically, she found the voices of “disrupters” to be eloquent and articulate when they were protesting war; but when they protest her own pet project, she finds them “un-American”. Now, she and other members of Congress are calling town hall protesters “angry mobs”, again dismissing rather than listening to them.

As for the media, they ignored the T.E.A. Party protests as long as they could and then, like the President, they mocked them. Someone came up with the idea to apply the derogatory term “teabaggers” to these protesters. They’ve had a good ole time on cable television congratulating themselves for their own cleverness. Not very professional. And certainly not respectful.

The President and members of Congress have much greater access to powerful channels of communication than do average American citizens. The President was given an entire ABC special broadcast to sell his plan. He has hosted town halls and written op-ed pieces published in papers all over the country. Congressmen host and control town hall meetings. I couldn’t help but laugh when Barney Frank complained at his town hall that people weren’t listening to him and weren’t having a fair dialog. How could there be a conversation? He made a rule that audience members could only ask questions. They were not allowed to make comments. Like the President, he was basically saying, “Shut up and listen.” But his constituents get to listen to him all the time. They can listen to his press conferences. On C-Span, they can listen to his committee meetings and house debates. With his franking privileges, he has ample opportunity to express his opinions in newsletters and other mailings. When does he listen to them?

Most people agree that the healthcare system needs reform. But before the system as they know it is gone forever, they want a truly reasonable discussion about it. They don’t want to be condescended to. They want to be heard.

Besides the rallies, they do have one other powerful venue: the voting booth. If the President and Congress don’t start showing some respect and listening to the people, the citizenry will only get angrier. There will be more protests. And people will use that last venue and throw the bums out.