Letters to the Editor for Monday, September 7, 2009

Health care fight needs a Rosa Parks
Thanks to The News & Advance for its coverage of the health care reform vigil downtown last week. The event was, in a word, depressing: the low turn-out (maybe 40), the tragic stories, the astronomical statistics about cost of care and increasing debt throughout our middle class.

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What is distressingly unclear is who will lead the fight that will guarantee the essential reform. Women, African-Americans and frightened teenagers were all large, unifiable groups of people, and more importantly, they succeeded because their cores, their ignitors were relatively young and healthy when they “Lit and raised their torches.”

The backbone of America, the group of semi-covered citizens, who know our system of health care provision is imbalanced and unjust, who know that it is able to find every penny it needs for senators with cancer but not for uninsured children with ear infections, is physically weak and geographically diffuse. It is aged, infirm, mentally unstable, uneducated, without access to information or so burdened with personal responsibilty and financial debt, that even the thought of going to Washington to protest is ludicrous.

America, it is time to acknowledge how many people in this country are destitute and can barely walk themselves, but are caring for others, for loved ones who cannot walk and have no insurance. The most tragic and frightening aspect of this dilemma is that the people who need the most help cannot even open their doors or raise their voices loud enough to express their plight.

The fight for health care reform demands young leaders, thousands of them, people with foresight, youthful people who, thanks to their vigilance and good fortune, are still healthy but who recognize that our middle class, the people who do the work, are already languishing and ill because of the existing health care system, a system which does serve some well, but which completely ignores millions.

Our government is listening to our complaints, but they are content with their own health care coverage and will not react to our requests unless we unite ... unless we attend future vigils in far greater numbers and shout our demands until they, each of our representatives, become afraid, as they did when Susan B. Anthony, Rosa Parks and the students at Kent State decided they were fed up and were not going to accept misrepresentation any longer.

Washington will listen to us, but only after we strike fear in its heart. Who among us is willing, and still able, to lead the charge?
DOUGLAS THOM III
Lynchburg

For argument’s sake
Several points come to mind in reply to the Sept. 6 letters to the editor.

The first point is that, contrary to Lib Elder’s assertion, the right did not “blindly accept every word” that President Bush spoke. It was the right, not the left, that stopped Bush’s version of immigration reform.

The second is a bit of advice to Nancy Tyree, solely in my role as a communications professional and professor. As a rule, branding your opponents as “anarchist, racist, budding domestic terrorists” does nothing to open their minds to your argument. Calling them “paranoid, dangerous extremists,” motivated by “tyranny and hatred” and “racism, homosexual bashing and fear of immigrants” is not fully persuasive of the correctness of your viewpoint.

And screaming “Nazis!” at those who disagree with you — ah, the ultimate and evergreen leftist arguing tactic — has not been shown to be effective in the long run, or for that matter, the short.
CAREY MARTIN
Forest