Free For All - The Free Liberal Blog: Featured on the Free Liberal

August 2008

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Regular Free Liberal readers may have noticed that on the top of each article page on the Free Liberal there is now a bar that says, "Featured on The Free Liberal" followed by links to two Free Liberal stories. We just added this feature two weeks ago to point out to our readers what we think are some of the best and most important articles we've run during the previous week.

This week we feature Michael Strong's "Getting Serious About Helping the Poor in the U.S." and Jonathan David Morris's It's Time to Forget About September 11th."

Michael Strong's piece does something very important -- it casts a public policy problem in truly human terms. Instead of reading about dry housing policy, we see it in terms of one woman's struggle for survival. It is important to remember that we are involved in the public sphere not to merely move cold statistics in the direction we favor, or to realize some abstract ideal for the abstraction's sake, but instead to help real people who are suffering.

The style reminds me of a speech that my friend Clarence Young made to the Buncombe County Commission when they were trying to ban RV's from trailer parks. Clarence happened to own a trailer park, and he told the commissioners a story which put the bureaucratic rule in human terms. A man had come to him and asked if he could park his RV in Clarence's lot. The man said he only had a few months to live, as he was dying of cancer, and wanted to be close to his ex-wife and daughter. Clarence had a policy of not allowing RVs and he thought that the man was lying, he was sure that he had AIDS, not cancer. But, he decided to let the man stay. Sure enough, later that year, he died. The newspaper obituary reported that he had died of AIDS. Clarence pointed out to the Commission, "This rule would have robbed me of one more chance to do a good thing for a fellow human being." Needless to say, the commissioners were pretty shaken up.

JDM's piece does something rather different. He takes what would seem to be an unsympathetic position of "forgetting September 11th" and shows how in one sense, it is the most American way of dealing with the horror. JDM doesn't argue that September 11th isn't tragic, but that we cannot continue to live in fear. He tells readers:

You can hoot and holler all you want about this concept. You can say I’m anti-American. You can even accuse me of spitting on the memories of all those who died. But you would miss the point of what I’m about to say here, because this has nothing to do with the heroes or victims, and nothing to do with politics.

But, some readers miss his point nonetheless. One need only to click over to the Free Republic to see how controversial such an idea can be in some circles. The responses become more and more ludicrous with people equating JDM with all sorts of nasty ideologies. They even post pictures of people jumping out of windows at the World Trade Center. When one Freeper points out to them that they are misreading his piece, "Actually the title is misleading. Read the whole article," another responds, "The title is his first sentence. They're his own words. Yeah, he's doing it for shock value. He asked for it, he's getting it."

JMC1969 writes, "I'll forget when all the scum sucking, America hating, terrorist loving assholes like this guy, are dead, rotting in their self made Hell. FU! and may God forgive your ignorance."

-- Kevin D. Rollins