Last week, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said, “She is worried about angry healthcare rhetoric.” In fact last Thursday, Speaker Pelosi said, that the anti-government rhetoric over President Barack Obama's health care reform effort is troubling because it reminds her of the violent debate over gay rights that roiled San Francisco in the 1970s. Anyone voicing hateful or violent rhetoric, she told reporters, must take responsibility for the results. "I have concerns about some of the language that is being used because I saw this myself in the late '70s in San Francisco," Pelosi said, suddenly speaking quietly. "This kind of rhetoric was very frightening" and created a climate in which violence took place, she said.
What Pelosi is referring to is the fact that former San Francisco Supervisor Dan White was convicted of the 1978 murders of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, a gay rights activist. Other gay rights activists and others at the time saw a link between the assassinations and the violent debate over gay rights that had preceded them for years. During a rambling confession, White was quoted as saying, "I saw the city as going kind of downhill." His lawyers argued that he was mentally ill at the time. White committed suicide in 1985.
Pelosi is part of a generation of California Democrats on whom the assassinations had a searing effect. A resident of San Francisco, Pelosi had been a Democratic activist for years and knew Milk and Moscone. At the time of their murders, she was serving as chairwoman of her party in the northern part of the state. Last Thursday, Pelosi was answering a question about whether the current vitriol concerned her. The questioner did not refer to the murders of Milk or Moscone, or the turmoil in San Francisco three decades ago. Pelosi referenced those events on her own and grew uncharacteristically emotional.
"I wish that we would all, again, curb our enthusiasm in some of the statements that are made," Pelosi said. Some of the people hearing the message "are not as balanced as the person making the statement might assume," she said. "Our country is great because people can say what they think and they believe," she added. "But I also think that they have to take responsibility for any incitement that they may cause." Now Pelosi's office did not immediately respond to a request for examples of contemporary statements that reminded the speaker of the rhetoric of 1970s San Francisco.
Still the public anger during health care town hall meetings in August spilled into the House last week when South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson shouted "You lie!" at Obama, the nation's first black president, during his speech. On a largely party-line vote, the House reprimanded Wilson. The tone of the protests has sparked a debate over whether the criticism of Obama, the nation's first black president, is really about his race. Former President Jimmy Carter has said he thinks the vitriol is racially motivated, but Obama does not believe that, a White House spokesman said.
Also on Thursday, when asked about Pelosi's remarks, House Republican Leader John Boehner said he hasn't seen evidence that any of the public anger could lead to violence. And he took issue with Carter's remarks. "I reject this resoundingly," Boehner told reporters, noting that he and other Republicans called Obama's election last year a defining moment for the nation. "The outrage that we see in America has nothing to do with race," Boehner said. "It has everything to do with the policies that he is promoting."
However what Nancy Pelosi has done is provoked a new type of tone into the healthcare debate that even President Obama and his administration doesn’t want which is race baiting, hate baiting or violence baiting. Simply put the healthcare debate has already been intensified many times over. Now I do agree that some of the healthcare rhetoric as well as the tone in America is not one that I agree with. Still for Speaker Pelosi to suggest that the rhetoric of today’s healthcare debate is similar to that of San Francisco without providing any text or factual information to back up her words is ill advised. In fact from all the healthcare town halls that I have seen on YouTube and on television, it seems as if a lot of the violence or physical fighting that has occurred has come from both those who support and are against it.
Nonetheless, it is still not enough for anyone to say that all those who oppose healthcare are racists because we all know that racism and bigotry in this nation has laid dormant for many years now and the election of President Obama perhaps has brought it out into the open now more than previously but we as people have to be careful when labeling others who criticize the President. This is no different than some of the labels thrown out when President Bush was President that I didn’t agree with. However now is not the time when so many Americans need better healthcare or some type of healthcare for us to get caught up in predicting that violence could occur from a lot of the rhetoric? Instead, our nation’s leaders past and present should be focused on trying to get the best bill accomplished it can get so that we as a nation can finally move a step closer to getting some type of positive healthcare reform done that could have gotten done when Nixon was in office to some degree.
Still we are at this point and instead of Speaker Pelosi trying to entice or suggest that the healthcare tone could turn to violence, she should be focusing on explaining how to the American people to be civil and to ask for everyone to find things they like in the current versions of the healthcare bills and tell your Congressional leaders what you like and what you don’t like rather than simply saying I want a public option or I don’t like anything. While Pelosi wants to take a sobering tone to the healthcare debate, she really to invoked violence into to a degree just like Jimmy Carter & others invoked race into the whole Rep. Wilson issue instead of just saying it was disrespectful and uncalled for.
A lot of emotions are flying about when it comes to healthcare but the rhetoric that should be getting across is more coverage for more Americans, protection of good practices and coverage’s that already exist, preventive measures to make people healthier, and reform aimed at improving the overall healthcare system in this nation in terms of services, results and coverage. This is what the healthcare debate rhetoric should be about rather than some of the tones that are just plain wrong that Speaker Pelosi somewhat was referring to and the rhetoric that Speaker Pelosi choose to use which is fear rhetoric.
The healthcare debate has invoked tons of fear in it from the left and the right. I am not going to say that one side is right over the other because I am one of those people that there is nothing to fear but fear itself and with that said, it is clear that some people believe that the only way healthcare reform will succeed or fail will be based off of playing on the fears of us the American people. Instead, we the American people shouldn’t listen to these fears or use these fears to make our decision on where we stand on healthcare. Therefore we the American people need to not fear healthcare or the unknown but we should fear that doing nothing will only keep us at the status quo. We might not get all of what we want in this healthcare reform bill but we need to make sure that what we do get is a little bit before than what currently have.
Thus Speaker Pelosi should try to make people on both the right and left understand that we are the United States of America rather than use her bully pulpit to put us against each other like she has done time and time again. Instead we need to have a civil tone in regards to healthcare. Some of the complaints on both the right and the left are legitimate. I have listened all summer up until now why we need healthcare reform and the ideas that each side has thrown out and there are good ideas on both sides. However when politicians and other leaders use fear in the form of violence and race is invoked than it deters from the good ideas from getting out there to the people.
Now is the time for us as a nation to hear the ideas and block out the fearful rhetoric from both the right and the left. We need a sobering tone indeed but not the type of sobering tone that Speaker Pelosi wants us to have. We need a civil debate on healthcare not the one that is brewing in America where the tone is about racism, violence and fear as well as un-American comments. Healthcare deserves better than this and we all know this but most of all Speaker Pelosi should know this since she is this nation’s third leading leader.
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