The Triangle

Issue date: 8/28/09 Section: Ed-Op

Media Credit: Dawn Magors Louis Post-Dispatch/MCT Campus

Media Credit: Michael J. Maloney Abaca Press/MCT Campus

From town halls across the country, older and younger generations alike rally to curtail the national health care bill already underway. However, these gatherings are by no means peaceful. Attendees bang on windows and shout and jeer at visiting representatives. The common justification for these outbursts is the First Amendment. Many things can be swept under the carpet of freedom of speech. These town hall encounters skew the stance of the American public on certain issues. Certainly, we are all concerned about health care and other methods of reform. As Mark Trumbull of the Christian-Science Monitor points out, "It may seem hard to gauge whether the citizen outbursts at this month's town hall meetings are real or staged ... How much do the town hall meetings reflect the range of American public opinion? The average person isn't necessarily shouting-match mad about health care or taxes, but large numbers share some concerns that have been raised in the recent public forums." The radical approach to giving public opinion is outdated; we're not on HBO, this is not "John Adams."

The precarious nature of the First Amendment lends itself to unfortunate scenarios - not only can we misrepresent public opinion at town hall meetings, we can also misinform? the public and make government reform appear to be an echo of Russo-socialist or even Nazi legislation. According to Garance Franke-Ruta and Sarah Lovenheim of The Washington Post, when Representative Barney Frank visited Dartmouth, Mass. Rachel Brown of the LaRouche Youth Movement (effectively a political cult) cited the president's pending legislation as a recreation of an old Nazi tactic, supplementing her opinion with a Photo-shopped image of the president with that famous Adolf moustache. "... they say we need to limit Medicare expenditures in order to do that, in order to reduce the deficit. That's the origin of this policy. This is the T4 policy, of the Hitler policy in 1939, when he said certain lives are not worth living; certain people, we should not spend the money to keep them alive. ... Why do you continue to support a Nazi policy, as Obama has expressly supported this policy?" Rhetorical fallacies such as Brown's above are not productive when so many Americans already have misgivings regarding their own financial situations - fueling the fire of national anxiety does not alleviate the economic turmoil we are all experiencing.

Big government has been a perpetual worry in American society, and the root of much of this fear is derivative of the Cold War era. Ronald Reagan, during his speech, "What Ever Happened to Free Enterprise" at Hillsdale College in 1977, elaborated on the lapse of government in its ability to serve the American people. "Beginning with the traumatic experience of the Great Depression, we the people have turned more and more to government for answers that government has neither the right nor the capacity to provide. But government, as an institution, always tends to increase in size and power, not just this government - any government."

Surely, the government at the present is larger than it is effective. However, I feel as though Reagan did not remedy this issue effectively. During his terms as president, Reagan reduced funding for all non-military programs, this capital instead used for endeavors such as "Star Wars" tax cuts that benefited the wealthy were ensured to "trickle down" to the poor à la Reaganomics. Reagan certainly decreased government presence in people's lives - in fact, the American people were left without security. During Reagan's initial term, federal taxes were dramatically decreased and an economic boom resulted. By consequence, many Americans today still associate small government with prosperity, when the reality is that the long-term effects of decreased funding to other government programs is a significant culprit in our fiscal dilemma today.

With this new president, we not only have the opportunity to extend social services and anti-trust laws, but also withdraw government from elements of our lives that are actually invasive (e.g. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act). If Medicare were to be disbanded in order to reduce government "interference" and instead funnel the revenue to military spending, would the aging baby boomers still cry, "I want my America back"? The apprehension in the town hall participants touches the pulse of the U.S. and even worldwide. Their frenzy reflects our own fears. However, now is not the time to peddle propaganda and untruths, nor are knee-jerk reactions justified.



Meina Kalayeh is a junior majoring in mathematics. She can be reached at op-ed@thetriangle.org

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