Call Me Old-fashioned–And Then Duck

Old Boys at the Town Hall

 

Ethan and I attended a town hall meeting on healthcare given by U.S. Representative Bill Pascrell at Montclair State University on September 3 in the afternoon. If you read the article I have linked above, you might get the impression that it turned into something of a donnybrook. Among the attendees, there was an extremely vocal minority opposed to health care reform. They interupted the discussion repeatedly with shouts and boos.  In essence, they turned what was meant to be an open discussion of healthcare reform between a congressman and his constituents into, pardon the expression, an uncivil war.

If you read the articles about this event, you might also come to the conclusion that the crowd was equally divided between those supporting healthcare reform and those opposed to it.

You would be wrong. Ethan and I were sitting directly in front of the three boxes where attendees deposited questions for Pascrell. I filed a good many of them for people who could not reach. To me, anyway, it seemed quite clear that the crowd had a strong majority of supporters of  reform. All you had to do was look at the three stacks. And, in fact, it seemed to me that many of those who counted themselves as undecided actually support reform–but have some reservations about the current political process in the House and Senate in Washington.

I am a strong supporter of free speech. I will listen to any reasoned argument. I am not, however, inclined to give much credence to those who express themselves by shouting and disrupting what should be, for any American, an ancient and revered process, going back to the very beginnings of this nation.

I am sorry to have to say that some in favor of reform responded by acting in the same childish manner. If we cannot have a reasoned debate of an important social issue, respecting the rights of all, we have lost contact with the fundamentals of citizen advocacy.

I am personally also of the opinion that the manner in which the discussion was conducted fed into the conflict. Pascrell and his aides moved from box to box selecting a question from each to respond to. This, to my mind, fed the misapprehension that the crowd was somehow equally divided between supporters and opponents of reform. If questions had been chosen at random from the whole stack, I feel that a more correct impression would have emerged.

I also think that a discussion like this should be moderated by an independent moderator, not by one of the parties, despite the fact that Representative Pascrell ended up doing quite a good job of handling the hecklers. At first, it seemed that he was losing his patience with them and then, at about the halfway point, he went strictly North Jersey on them–his accent even changed at that point. To put it bluntly, he got in their faces.

Okay, call me old-fashioned, but it troubles me that good manners, civil conduct and rational dialogue no longer have an honored place in America. I am sticking to my guns. Maybe I took social studies too seriously, but I learned that my rights end where yours begin, and vice versa. Using your right to free speech to interfere with the free speech of others is unacceptable. What those hecklers were doing is just plain wrong. If you are one of them, go ahead and comment, but, uh, I moderate the comments. And I spent a good part of the last ten years tracking  and deleting people who misbehave online. It will be just like old times. I am not a big fan of online incivility either. Go ahead, give it a shot. If you make a civil, reasoned argument, I will approve it. If you misbehave, you are busted.

Oh well, there is an upside to everything. Pretty soon our founding fathers rolling in their graves might well become a promising source for green energy. 

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