Free Speach
I get e-mail from my conservative and liberal friends.
They all want me to know the truth.
Before E-mail I got snail mail from the same friends and sometimes I even talked to them in person.
Over the years my liberal friends have invited me to join a number of boycotts.
Liberals really seem to like boycotts.
I was asked to boycott pants, orange juice, frozen chicken, various companies using bad pesticide, products from farms that treated animals badly, and of course the one everyone loves to boycott WalMart.
Each one could be justified in terms of making this a better world by changing the behavior of a company.
I didn’t like them. I didn’t join them. But I understood them.
But this weekend my liberal friends requested I boycott Whole Foods.
I don’t shop at Whole Foods. I’m not into organic foods. But they gave me this website and this to get information.
What I found scared me.
This boycott was not to change behavior but to punish free speech.
The man being boycotted had committed an unpardonable sin.
He was a dyed in the wool liberal with great liberal credentials and he had dared on the op-ed page of the Wall Street journal to suggest an alternative eight point plan to the omnibus health bill that liberals love.
Such defiance had to be punished.
So they set out to smear him and to hurt him economically.
He would pay for being a bad liberal.
But the President and the Democrats had called for people to openly and publicly share their proposals . They were sure that people were sneaking around on the internet spreading lies that they couldn’t see and couldn’t refute.
But John Mackey couldn’t have done it much more publicly then the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal.
You would have expected the President or a leading Democrat to enter into dialogue.
You know take the points one by one and show how they would fail or how they were less effective than the omnibus bill. Come on in 16000 pages you should be able to find something better than eight suggestions.
But we have gotten, so far, from the President and the Democrats is silence.
Nobody has stepped forward to discuss the eight points.
The attack is not on the ideas but on the man who gave them.
That’s not dialogue, Mr. President.
It really isn’t.
So I wait for my President to commend Mr. Mackey for taking part in an open discussion of the issues.
I wait for him to decry the boycott of a person for having different solutions than his.
I wait.
In the meantime I wanted to know what Mr. Mackey said. My liberal friends didn’t include that.
I guess it didn’t matter because it was wrong.
So I Goggled Boycott Whole Foods and found this where the eight points are published.( Believe me it was hard to find, Nobody right or left seems to care about the ideas they just want to attack or defend the man.
If my conservative friends had told me this was happening in America. I would have chalked it up to the usual conservative paranoia but it came from my liberal friends.
So I sit here in fear of a country where you can be punished for bad ideas.
I wait for my President to save me.
I wait,
posted by Dr.John at 1:00 AM
20 Comments:
Tell me you're not holding your breath ...
tell me did you really think the present administration would ever exist? it feels like a dream, a dream that i wish i had never had!
but it has shown me how twisted the liberal are in their thinking!
Thanks for taking the time to do this. I love #8, it is a start. I would contribute to that, and it would be a win/win.
You are asking questions without name calling. I am so saddened by the rhetoric I hear.
difficult for me to comment on that, it's too much on American politics. We don't have any health insurance problems in Belgium it is a very good system which covers everybody, poor or rich but of course the money comes from the taxes we pay on our salaries.
You should be in Washington. But then... you probably have more listeners HERE than you would THERE.
I have a felling Dr. John
, that you are going to be waiting a long, long time!
Love Di
I'm right there with you, Dr. John, waiting. I have a feeling we will be waiting for quite a while. Our President and his Administration seem to be a little preoccupied with trampling on our Bill of Rights to really hear what anyone has to say about anything, especially if what they have to say is negative and/or against anything they are working to accomplish. I'm going to go sit and wait for the government to go and pick me up for speaking against them now. ;)
I check in on both the overt liberal and conservative TV networks, and the overwhelming tone of the reporting is "See how stupid that other side's people are. ha ha ha."
But then, many of the "Christian bloggers" aren't much better. My sister pointed me in the direction of a Christian radio commentator who had a blog. Her only claim to any credentials seemed to be that she was the daughter of a Christian pastor, but I wouldn't hold that against her; she is still a Child of God. But the commentary from her was extraordinarily down-putting, over generalizing , and name calling of any Christian group that she saw as having a taint of liberalism or "emergent," whatever that is.
I would expect Lutheran blogs to be better, but when I first started reading blogs, I went to lots of "Lutheran blogs" written by pastors. At that time, there weren't so many in my denomination, but there were quite a few in the group named after a state, not the state you live in. There were several times that, after reading, I felt like dirt. My pastor told me to stop reading those blogs.
I want to learn about other viewpoints and why people believe in them, but the public discourse these days seems not to be about understanding the views of others, but just putting down others so that one feels "better than."
It's all very interesting to observe. I don't know how it'll all work out, but thanks to you, I've read the op-ed piece, and I agree with almost everything Mr. Mackey suggested. If people knew that their MRI cost $5000, they'd do a little more questioning, perhaps shop around a little. Premiums are automatically deducted from payroll & retirement checks, so patients don't really see where their money's going. When they go for treatment, what they experience is practically free. (i.e. A $20 co-pay vs. the $2,000 paid by the ins co.) I sure wish that they would listen to Mr. Mackey rather than respond in their knee-jerk fashion
Ah, one thing I've learned at a family function during the Clinton administration is never discuss politics...
bipartisan all the way for me, but great post -- it's causing a stir.
:)
Sue
I sure hope you don't wait to long my friend. You could be there a while :)
God Bless you Dr. John...You're gonna be waiting for a long time, I am afraid...
I also think you will be waiting for a long time Dr John,
While you keep waiting , let me tell you I love the way you write, how you present your 'problems'. It's great. You always have something to give people to think about. I hate politics, but follow your work... as you know- of course!
Thank you so much for coming to mine.
I really like your comment :)
You can wait, but it isn't going to happen. Thanks for a great post!
That was a heavy one; let's hope your wait will not be to long. Reading all this, I have taken one decision: Not to boykott anything (even if i should); it is to cumbersome.
You know... I really really REALLY miss your wrap up.
From my experience those who shout loudest about free speech don't really understand it and put down anyone who disagrees with their version of free speech.
I'm waiting with you. I think it is going to be a while.
I haven't been paying attention to what is going on down there lately so have missed this. See my comment on your previous post Dr. John.
And yes - it's your blog - you say what you want to say. You go big guy!!
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