Saturday, March 13, 2010

What Color Will YOUR Avatar Be, When Health Care Reform Passes?

I'll get to that shortly...but first, I'd like to review a statement Nancy Pelosi made a few weeks back:

As I said to some friends yesterday in the press, we will go through the gate. If the gate is closed, we will go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we will pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, we will parachute in. But we are going to get health care reform passed for the American people for their own personal health and economic security and for the important role that it will play in reducing the deficit.

Abe Greenwald clarifies what I found most troublesome about this statement, coming from the Speaker of the House:

The barriers she cites are none other than the checks and balances, the procedural roadblocks, put in place centuries ago so that no lawmaker or executive could force policy upon the American people “for their own personal health and economic security.” Speaker Pelosi’s statement is not merely colorful evidence of tenacity and cunning. It is a contemptuous dismissal of democracy. Just as the plan for socialist annexation of one sixth of the economy is a dismissal of free-market capitalism.


Funny too, how comfortable Pelosi is bragging that she made this statement to the press. Their reason for being, at one time, was to protect us from people like the Speaker. Instead, she can talk openly before them of subversion and tyranny, knowing they have been completely co-opted by their ideological biases.

So getting back to the title of this post - many folks shaded their Twitter avatars, or their blog pages, green a few months back as a show of support for the short-lived uprising of the Iranian people. A nice gesture, I'm sure, but no more effective than a "Free Tibet" bumper sticker is in actually, you know...freeing Tibet. Better to hit the streets like they did, or at least hit the phones and demand support for their struggle from our legislators.

So when and if health care reform passes and is signed into law, in complete subversion (for that seems the only path left for Pelosi & Posse) of the spirit, if not the very letter, of the Constitution and the law itself, what do we do?

For we will then be operating under a government as illegitimate as any thug regime operating in the world today.

Do we take to the streets en masse - like our Iranian heroes - and throw the nation into turmoil, resisting until legitimacy is restored? Or do we pick a common shade for our avatars and blogs to register our disgust in a more urbane way, one that won't upset our routines or our digestion?

I'm just asking - asking myself as well as any who may be reading this. For the day may be upon us to choose, and the actions we take - or do not take -will, either way, mark us in the history books forever...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Good point. Guess we'll see what we're made of. Because showing our disgust with a red/white/blue shade over our avatars will not impress Nancy and Barack any more than Obama's "stern disapproval" deterred the mullahs from kil;ling their own people.