Several weeks ago, when a White House website overtly called for turning people in if they had “fishy” ideas about what the President was proposing about healthcare (read: your disagreement will be noted, officially, by the government) I spent a lot of energy restraining myself from blogging here to say something like this:
Mr. President: Given that Disability Matters is all over the web, one of your sycophants may well have turned me in for my “fishy” ideas.
If not, I’m here to tell you that I admit, confess, and am willing to sign a public confession (to be released to state media, of course, and where I will stipulate that I was not coerced) that I have “fishy” ideas about your healthcare proposals. Ahead of the signed confession, I have publically so confessed, and I consider it a badge of honor that as of this notification, I am on your government “Fishy List.”
Knocks on the door in the dead of night are half expected.
Bring it on.
Here’s why, Mr. President. I grew up as a privileged white person in apartheid South Africa. I was raised as an English-speaking minority within the white minority. I was raised in the understanding that apartheid was evil, but that there really wasn’t much that could be done, on an individual level, to change it.
As a college student, I disagreed.
I spoke up.
It cost me.
The apartheid regime’s security police followed me for years. They rode by and took my photo. They opened my mail. Thugs all. Somewhere in the dusty vaults of the previous South African regime there is a fat folder with this label: “Mostert, Mark P., Fishy Ideas.”
So, Mr. President, I understand propaganda and state coercion. I believe we have seen it in the healthcare debate.
We’ve seen it in the just-reported coercion of the National Endowment for the Arts commandeered to strong-arm the arts for your healthcare agenda.
And, Mr. President, be aware that there are many of us, the Fishy Family, who understand that in the House bill, H.R. 3200 the forces of death, aka the former Hemlock Society, and (no aka) some members of Congress who never saw an assisted suicide they didn’t like, are preening and chattering about how they helped write the parts of the bill endorsing killing, and, dare I say (gasp) death panels.
I understand in this new season of change and hope that the change is a shadowy pro-death process whose authors cannot contain their glee at what they might accomplish.
And that hope, Mr. President, leans precariously toward the chilling idea that our most vulnerable, our elderly, sick, veterans, and disabled, will be disposed of because, after all, (as the former Hemlock Society, and members of your party in Congress would say) they don’t have a good quality of life.
The Government giveth. The Government taketh away.
5 comments:
Very well said. I thoroughly appreciate your thoughtful and logical way of writing. Additionally, I think holding back your blogging on the subject until now has helped to sweeten-or should I say-sharpen the words that you wrote.
Thank you for all your are doing.
I think that was very powerfully said. And I think it should serve as a warning. If people don't stand up and speak out now, it will be too late.
Tim, thanks for your encouragement. The pro-death and other propaganda is becoming bolder by the day. Most people don't monitor these things as closely as I do, so it's not surprising that it can happen. That means we all need to spread the word as energetically as we can.
Sarah, please help spread the word, and thanks for stopping by!!!!
How odd that these Leftists feel entitled to intrude into the most profoundly private decisions, and that they are unashamed social engineers, but when we propose marriage reforms to reduce the divorce rate, keep families intact and generally preserve the (social) ecosystem for children, they rally to individual sovereignty and declare insurmountable privacy objections.
Post a Comment