A few months ago, or was it years now, there was a local restaurant owner who put a sign on his business front. It was a rude comment to the President – for you news crawler fans otherwise called POTUS. His sign was in protest of the President’s news conference comments about the need for the government, in the matter of businesses and public utilities infrastructure. With regard to business owners, it was said, “you didn’t build it.” Meaning that the business owner didn’t build it, the government helped because of the highways and roads, and such.
Locally, it became a news item on TV, and then on a local legislator’s Facebook page. I agreed with the business owner, rude or not, and jumped into the fray on the Facebook site. That exchange got nowhere and degenerated into an economic discussion on gross national product figures. I took another step later, and blogged about all of this on another site, along with some other points. It went out, published on that site, but I had a comment from the site host owner advising me, “don’t be a demagogue.”
Frankly, I really didn’t think that I was that strong in my opinion. I may have been a touch dogmatic , but a demagogue? I wasn’t running for any office. I was always going to comment back to the chap, but never did. It occurred to me that it would not have mattered, as it was a political and government view which differed in the purpose and powers of government control. They read my view or comments, and didn’t like it, or didn’t agree with me.
It reminded me, still later, of when I was in another discussion, on a group email exchange. It had to do with the water situation in central California this year. The group, mostly ranchers and farmers or connected to agribusiness, were eloquent about the gripe that legislators and state leaders had reneged on promises of which crops would be allowed to be preserved. Mixed in with this was the discussion on vegetarians, beef production, and others, and how to be civil with the arguments. Apparently, almonds were now discussed as a crop that used to be preserved as now a crop that had to be deleted. It was asked by one fellow, “How can we reason with those leaders to understand these things?”
I emailed back an answer. And the fellow replied, “Can we just write them off and cut them loose from our efforts?” It was something like that.
My answer was, “Well, yeah. How can you convince a group of vegetarians who want to destroy the world’s greatest source of plant protein. They’re idiots.”
There was no reply from that person. He may have been a vegetarian. One other in the group made a positive reply, but I have not heard from them since. I think I may have been dropped from the group. I guess I wasn’t diplomatic in my, uh ………….. expression.

THE DOC ~ Revised Edition
Copyright © 2014 by Tim Desmond
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Print ISBN: 978-1-626941-44-1

Timothy J. Desmond
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