By Mike Mercer, Stevensville
I have no particular political slant as I dislike all politicians but they have a function. It is our job, as citizens, to be the sentinels and call out BS when we hear it from these “Public Servants.” This is a difficult task as tribes are formed to protect ideals that may be pure BS and it is hard to discern truth when another tribe is in your face.
With that said, the year was 1969, I was a senior at a Catholic high school in California, my task was a term paper. I chose the Reconstruction era policies of the Republican Party and the formation by Southern Democrats of the Ku Klux Klan in resistance to same. History has not changed but the labels we apply have, in order to facilitate an agenda.
A recent letter caught my eye as a good example of this trend to redefine circumstances to fit an agenda. Thanks to the internet I could look up these terms and see if the gentleman’s letter was an accurate accounting of the political origins of the KKK; wow, he is spot on according to Wikipedia. I dug a bit deeper into a few terms such as far-right wing and found consistency throughout. The wow part comes when far-right-wing is suddenly replaced with right-wing to describe the KKK. These are apples and oranges that we are told to accept as coming from the same tree. It is a simple alteration that transforms a meaning, which leads to a lot of confusion and anger because someone, somewhere decides to do some word-smithing. KKK is most definitely of Left-Wing origins; you must go beyond Wikipedia. Just to set the record straight, George Wallace ran three times for the Presidency as a “Democrat” and once as an “American Independent”; by the way, he lost them all.
The writer’s letter was plump with terms, such as “Vichy Republicans” and “quasi-Orwellian” to name a few. This only adds momentum to an agenda that will foster the separation of our countrymen from the true history of this great Republic. We can fix this but we must first acknowledge that our “Public Servants” have an agenda, change history, one word at a time.