Aren't We Above This?
July 28, 2016 at 4:25 p.m.
By Gary [email protected]
He was out and about, as he is wont to do on a daily basis, looking for a feature photo.
He decided to do something with campaign signs so he started paying attention to them. That's when he came across a board nailed to a big oak tree about 10 feet off the ground.
At the end of the board was a short noose. In the noose was what appears to be a black trash bag with something stuffed in it to crudely represent a head. The rest of the bag was hanging downward from the "head in the noose."
Halloween is coming up and there are all manner of creepy things hanging around people's yards. We have a little ghost blowing in the wind in our yard, for example.
But no, this had nothing to do with Halloween. I know this because on the board was a quite legible sign that read "Obama" in big letters.
Accuse me of stupid naiveté if you must, but I really thought we were beyond that. I remember a while back when that Jena Six thing was going on in Louisiana.
I was thinking how backward that was.
Then there was that noose hanging on the door of the black professor's office at Columbia University last year. That raised an eyebrow because Columbia would be one of the last places on earth where one would expect to encounter such an overtly racist act.
I was thinking how sad that was.
So now, we have our own noose.
As a newspaper guy, I am all for freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of expression.
I also am an ardent supporter of our right to criticize our government and candidates. After all, it's a fairly significant part of what I do for a living.
For those reasons, I am not a big fan of political correctness. I think that tends to suppress freedom of speech and expression.
But this?
I understand it's not illegal. (Althought I think in some jurisdictions where they have hate-crime legislation, it might get you in trouble to hang nooses.)
Regardless of what you think about hate crime laws and freedom of speech issues, come on people. Can't we all agree this is wrong?
So now we have a picture of this and then comes the big decision. Do we put it in the newspaper?
As much as we wanted to inform the community of the level of local wackiness, the decision was no.
We simply would not take the risk of someone mistakenly thinking we were somehow promoting it.
Frankly, no matter how much we condemned it in the caption, the image itself would have been far more compelling than anything we could have written.
We just didn't want our newspaper associated with that image.
So there you have it.
Warsaw, hotbed of progressive thought that it is, gives us Obama in a noose.
Nice.
I just hope nobody sends that photo to CNN.
*****
Speaking of CNN, just the other day I heard some analyst-type guy from the Euro Pacific Capital investment outfit talking.
I reluctantly admit to watching CNN daily, for more hours than I should. So over the past few weeks I have heard quite literally dozens of these analyst-type guys blather on about the financial crisis.
This was the first one - the only one so far - that has espoused my point of view on the whole mess.
Frankly, I was beginning to think maybe I was the only one on the planet to embraces these thoughts - and that I was insane for doing so.
But then along comes the Euro Pacific Capital guy and I am feeling a little better about myself.
He said, basically, that the credit crisis was a crisis of too much credit.
Interest rates were low. People bought stuff they couldn't - or shouldn't - have been buying.
Things like houses using whacky adjustable rate mortgages with balloon payments. This drove up the "alleged" value of houses. I say alleged because houses probably never were really worth what people were paying for them at the height of the housing boom.
So, of course, when the artificially inflated housing marked took a nose dive, people owed more on their houses than the houses were worth.
Time for foreclosures.
Anyway, back to the analyst guy. He says - and I fully concur - that the powers that be in Washington have got it the wrong way around.
They're trying to prop credit markets up and get consumers confident again so that they can buy stuff again - on credit, of course.
So, instead going into some complex, convoluted explanation, let me say it like this:
The problem is too much debt caused by too much credit. So the government is trying to solve it by encouraging more credit.
It's akin to throwing a bucket of water on a man about to be struck by a tidal wave.
See, those guys in Washington know this. I think they're trying to prolong the agony in the hopes that it will be somehow less severe.
I say, let interest rates rise. Let credit be tight. Let inflation kick in. Encourage people to start saving money instead of buying stuff they can't afford. Encourage people to eliminate debt.
Sure, it would be a very painful time in these great United States. But we would bounce back. And I believe we would bounce back in a relatively short period of time. Plus, when we did, we would still be a free-market economy.
As it is, the government is buying up big chunks of private financial institutions and propping up credit markets.
I believe, as did my new-found analyst friend on CNN, that we may not hit the bottom as hard, but it'll be a lot longer fall. And when we do finally start to recover, we're going to have some freaky socialist/free-market hybrid kind of financial system.
We all agree the financial crisis is a tough pill to swallow. But should we just swallow it, or let it dissolve in our mouths first?[[In-content Ad]]
He was out and about, as he is wont to do on a daily basis, looking for a feature photo.
He decided to do something with campaign signs so he started paying attention to them. That's when he came across a board nailed to a big oak tree about 10 feet off the ground.
At the end of the board was a short noose. In the noose was what appears to be a black trash bag with something stuffed in it to crudely represent a head. The rest of the bag was hanging downward from the "head in the noose."
Halloween is coming up and there are all manner of creepy things hanging around people's yards. We have a little ghost blowing in the wind in our yard, for example.
But no, this had nothing to do with Halloween. I know this because on the board was a quite legible sign that read "Obama" in big letters.
Accuse me of stupid naiveté if you must, but I really thought we were beyond that. I remember a while back when that Jena Six thing was going on in Louisiana.
I was thinking how backward that was.
Then there was that noose hanging on the door of the black professor's office at Columbia University last year. That raised an eyebrow because Columbia would be one of the last places on earth where one would expect to encounter such an overtly racist act.
I was thinking how sad that was.
So now, we have our own noose.
As a newspaper guy, I am all for freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of expression.
I also am an ardent supporter of our right to criticize our government and candidates. After all, it's a fairly significant part of what I do for a living.
For those reasons, I am not a big fan of political correctness. I think that tends to suppress freedom of speech and expression.
But this?
I understand it's not illegal. (Althought I think in some jurisdictions where they have hate-crime legislation, it might get you in trouble to hang nooses.)
Regardless of what you think about hate crime laws and freedom of speech issues, come on people. Can't we all agree this is wrong?
So now we have a picture of this and then comes the big decision. Do we put it in the newspaper?
As much as we wanted to inform the community of the level of local wackiness, the decision was no.
We simply would not take the risk of someone mistakenly thinking we were somehow promoting it.
Frankly, no matter how much we condemned it in the caption, the image itself would have been far more compelling than anything we could have written.
We just didn't want our newspaper associated with that image.
So there you have it.
Warsaw, hotbed of progressive thought that it is, gives us Obama in a noose.
Nice.
I just hope nobody sends that photo to CNN.
*****
Speaking of CNN, just the other day I heard some analyst-type guy from the Euro Pacific Capital investment outfit talking.
I reluctantly admit to watching CNN daily, for more hours than I should. So over the past few weeks I have heard quite literally dozens of these analyst-type guys blather on about the financial crisis.
This was the first one - the only one so far - that has espoused my point of view on the whole mess.
Frankly, I was beginning to think maybe I was the only one on the planet to embraces these thoughts - and that I was insane for doing so.
But then along comes the Euro Pacific Capital guy and I am feeling a little better about myself.
He said, basically, that the credit crisis was a crisis of too much credit.
Interest rates were low. People bought stuff they couldn't - or shouldn't - have been buying.
Things like houses using whacky adjustable rate mortgages with balloon payments. This drove up the "alleged" value of houses. I say alleged because houses probably never were really worth what people were paying for them at the height of the housing boom.
So, of course, when the artificially inflated housing marked took a nose dive, people owed more on their houses than the houses were worth.
Time for foreclosures.
Anyway, back to the analyst guy. He says - and I fully concur - that the powers that be in Washington have got it the wrong way around.
They're trying to prop credit markets up and get consumers confident again so that they can buy stuff again - on credit, of course.
So, instead going into some complex, convoluted explanation, let me say it like this:
The problem is too much debt caused by too much credit. So the government is trying to solve it by encouraging more credit.
It's akin to throwing a bucket of water on a man about to be struck by a tidal wave.
See, those guys in Washington know this. I think they're trying to prolong the agony in the hopes that it will be somehow less severe.
I say, let interest rates rise. Let credit be tight. Let inflation kick in. Encourage people to start saving money instead of buying stuff they can't afford. Encourage people to eliminate debt.
Sure, it would be a very painful time in these great United States. But we would bounce back. And I believe we would bounce back in a relatively short period of time. Plus, when we did, we would still be a free-market economy.
As it is, the government is buying up big chunks of private financial institutions and propping up credit markets.
I believe, as did my new-found analyst friend on CNN, that we may not hit the bottom as hard, but it'll be a lot longer fall. And when we do finally start to recover, we're going to have some freaky socialist/free-market hybrid kind of financial system.
We all agree the financial crisis is a tough pill to swallow. But should we just swallow it, or let it dissolve in our mouths first?[[In-content Ad]]
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