Letter from a "Fan"

Photo Wendy Lynne Lee

Sometimes you have to let the opposition speak. 

I was recently confronted while out shopping by a rather animated gentleman (see pictures--sorry about the quality) who recognized me. In the interest of fairness, I agreed to post his opinion and I offered my email address. 

This is what appeared.

Dear Miss. Lee,

As a property owner and a proud American patriot I resent your constant opposition to the god-given rights of people to make money off the blessed bounty of natural gas that lies under our feet. My great- great grand-dad was amongst the first real Americans who came to this county to bring civilization and the ethic of hard work to an untamed wilderness. Before that this place was nothing - everybody knows that. My people built it into what it is today. As an outsider not born here, you probably would not understand that. I live on the same ground my hole life and know everything I ever needed to know without ever needing to go to far. Its outsiders like you who are hell bent on taking away our rights to live free and make money on our land as we see fit.

Why you libtards think you can come to our area, live here for 10 or 20 years and then tell us what the Lord gave us is not ours to use is beyond me. My family has been here since the beginning. If it was up to you my grand-dad would of never had a job cutting all the trees down during the lumber years.  And know what? You can look out your window and see that, no matter how many trees they cut, it all grew back. That is how the lord takes care of his people, but YOU atheists would not know that now would you? It is the same with natural gas – the lord provides a bounty for those with brains enough to use it anyway they see fit. To not use it is a waste and waste is a sin (everybody who reads the bible knows that). Maybe you should try reading the bible instead of other books written by commies and ignorant intellectuals.

Photo Wendy Lynne Lee

I, for one, am tired of you tree-huggen Obama lovers crying about climate change. Climate change is in the bible, ever hear of the great flood?  THAT was climate change and it made the world better as it got rid of all the perverts and dumber animals like the dinosaurs who could not swim. So, if there is climate change it will probably get rid of people like you who are ruining our country and do not respect our rights.

If I want to put a gas well or a pipeline or nuclear power plant on my land THAT IS MY RIGHT! If you don’t like it than you can plant some trees or put up a fence so you don’t have to look at it. And if you don’t like the smell of a compressor station – TOO BAD! I might not like the smell of whatever you burn on your stove next door but that does not mean I can tell you what to COOK!!

My flag tells me this is still a FREE country and, if you don’t like it, you are FREE to MOVE. Perhaps you might want to try one of those countries like Iraq or Iran who hate us and hate our natural gas. They want us to be superstious like them and slaves to there oil. Natural gas will keep us free and protect our way of life – everybody knows that! Except maybe libtard enviro wackos like you who think they are smarter than everyone who was here first.

Signed,

Benjamin Zene
Bloomsburg PA. 

Capitalism, Human Welfare, and the Healthcare Debate: Death--American Style

10.17.09

To the Editor,

Among the most disturbing features of our current political landscape, exemplified by the tea-baggers, the birthers, the secessionists, the H1N1 vaccine-as-mind-control conspiracy-mongers, and other “patriots,” is the extent to which craving short-term gain—Obama-out-of-office-at-any-cost—drives the willingness to adopt beliefs that are not merely wrong-headed, but profoundly self-defeating.

The healthcare debate could not illustrate this any more clearly: we’re not merely willing to sell out our un/underinsured fellows to disease and death, we’re apparently willing to take the risk that we could end up among them just for the sake of opposing a public option.

The same “patriots” who condemn Obama for “cutting” their Medicare would apparently let their neighbor’s children die for lack of access to the care these “patriots” take as entitled. This isn’t merely hypocrisy; it’s perversity. Cynically exploiting the rhetoric of “free choice,” the “health” insurance industry has so successfully suckered the tea-partiers that they can be counted on to attend fake grassroots events and rally against their own interests—even their interest in living. Every placard heralding “freedom” may as well be heralding suffering and death, every endorsement of the “free market” a pitch for rationing-healthcare-by-the-mega-profits-of-Cigna-and-company. Why? Because the defeat of the public option is a win for an industry whose profits have increased by 416% over the last decade by denying coverage, refusing to pay claims, and by dropping sick people from their roles—after raping them of their hard-earned dollars.

What the tea-partiers don’t get is that the same tactics they’ve so effectively deployed against those who’d resist their ideological swill is now—through ignorance-exploiting-stealth—being deployed to insure that they, many of whom are among the most economically vulnerable, stand on the side of the super-wealthy. Quite the coup. All the “health” insurance promotion arms had to do was use the magic words “socialism,” “communism,” or “government controlled,” through their Republican Party propaganda channel—FOX—and the paranoid “patriot”-sheeple fall in lock-step—behind their pied pipers, Beck, Hannity, Malkin, O’Reilly, right off the cliff. Death is apparently OK with them so long as we get rid of a black democratic president.

Unconvinced? Offended? Think the “free market” is on your side? Check out Rendell’s Republican budget. He cuts funding for the Department of Public Welfare, discards a possible severance tax on natural gas drilling, cuts the Department of Environmental Protection 27%, and opens state park land to drilling. Who benefits? The “health” insurance analogues in the energy industry, corporations like Cabot whose suspension for environmental violations has been lifted, and White Pines who has “the state’s go-ahead to accept radioactive sludge” from natural gas drilling.

However willfully blind we are to the connection between environmental destruction and human health, the writing’s on the wall: capitalist enterprise cares nothing whatever for human welfare. Indeed, the very corporations who exercise the most power over life and death—HEALTH insurance—actively work to deny the services PAID FOR by the people who hold their policies. This IS insurance—an insurance of death. Corporations like Cabot, Cigna, Aetna, Humana, White Pines, Exxon, AIG, Citibank, and on and on have so effectively exploited the fear of “socialism” and the racist hatred of Obama that we’re willing to sacrifice our health and the environment it depends on in order to realize what? The freedom to die from untreated disease? The freedom to watch others reap the profits of environmental obliteration?

So long as Obama’s not reelected, and we get to go down waving the flag, I guess so.

Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu
580 words.