Brunswick Beacon, 08.04.22
Suppose you have a health problem. You see your doctor who diagnoses it and prescribes a course of treatment. Being careful, you decide to get a second opinion.
Doctor #2 tells you to ignore doctor #1 because he’s a “liberal,” a “moral sophist,” and a member of a “self-righteous, virtue-signaling aristocracy.” Worse still, he says, doctor #1 is trying to divert you from the “moral decay” he and his “ilk” have “sponsored through indoctrination of your children into their secular belief system.”
He doesn’t address your urgent health problem, and offers no facts that contradict doctor #1’s opinion.
I’m a retired registered nurse. If I got that kind of unhelpful name-calling from my doctor, I would run screaming from the room.
On July 21, a Carolina Shores reader wrote a fact-filled letter to the editor concerning two health problems facing Americans today: gun violence and global warming. On July 28, Rey Wojdat responded by hurling each of the insults quoted above, and others, too. He did not refute her facts, but devoted his entire letter to attacking her personally and questioning her motives.
He offered no answers to the urgent problems she discussed.
There have been 25,440 gun violence deaths and 372 mass shootings in 2022, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Both are near-record levels. In the wake of mass shootings in Buffalo, NY and Uvalde, TX, 68% 0f Americans support stronger gun safety laws, also a record high.
Global warming has led to record heat in Britain, unprecedented wildfires in Europe, and “dangerous and record-breaking heat” warnings in much of America’s Great Plains and South. Recent polling shows that 62% of Americans believe that passing a climate bill should be a priority for Congress.
Unless Americans in the minority on both issues abandon divisive insults in favor of good faith debate based on provable facts, we will never address either problem.
Linda McConnell Baker
Leland