Olympic Peninsula Environmental News

A few weeks back, I was attending a breakfast session to raise funds for the local hospice. My family has been a customer of hospice a few times, so it’s a charity close to my heart. While there, I sat next to a local reporter. He ended up doing a great job of reporting on the event, and while we ate breakfast, waiting for the speakers, we introduced ourselves.

When I mentioned my name, he thought a moment and said, “I recognize your name, but can’t place it. Are you one of our local “rabble-rousers"?  I laughed and said, “I guess so, as I speak out occasionally on issues that I feel are important, usually around the environment.”

As the days have gone since that breakfast, I have thought about that comment. While it was probably innocent enough, I found that there were many ways I could take the comment, depending on how I felt about myself. And today  on the Fourth of July, I’m also thinking about our Founding Fathers (and mothers too).

I might have taken that comment to mean that I was one of the people that, in the press room, behind closed doors, or over drinks after work,  are considered a ‘nut case’, one of the local cranks or angry old men, who seem to populate the editorial columns these days, ranting about government excess.  Or perhaps the local press, so sensitized to having to be careful about not getting local advertisers upset, that anything that smacks of negativity is suppressed, for the sake of survival.

Living in small town America, you learn that in private you can complain about anything, and most people do, but that in public, and in the press, you never complain about anything, or face ridicule by your peers.

The ‘rabble’ in the old days was the unwashed and uneducated mass of humanity that leaders in those days wanted to keep ignorant and subservient.  They ended up being the people who rose up against those leaders and demanded to get more. Sometimes, like in France and America, they got much more. Sometimes they were shipped to Australia.

So this is the place we’ve come, as Americans, since 1776. From a country populated by true ‘rabble-rousers”, people who used the press to get the population roused to take action, or mirrored the action of the few to the many, to a world where we are labeled by the press for simply opening our mouths. We watch as ‘rabble-rousers’” in the Middle East take their freedom from despots, or when Spanish youth by the millions protest their extraordinary unemployment numbers. But here, that’s just a label, a subtle put down that is meant to mean, “do you really fit here?"

It seems to me that most of us in America, go along to get along. That’s to be expected. And when I speak up I always try and do it with a smile on my face.  But on the Fourth of July, while we honor those who put at risk homes and businesses, and their very lives, to change a political situation that needed changing, that we all could be a bit more of a bunch of “rabble-rousers”. Looking at the state of our economy,  our environment, and those that are less fortunate around us, struggling to just hold on, makes me want to do a bit of rabble-rousing. While many of those that claim to lead us simply want to compromise so that they won’t seem to be ‘rabble-rousers’, it means to me that to preserve our freedom or solve problems with the environment, you sometimes have to take unpopular positions. It comes with the territory.

Filed under: Puget Sound | Tagged: Puget Sound |