For over 150 years, every Sunday morning in London’s Hyde Park, thousands of people gather at Speaker’s Corner to discuss and debate politics and life issues.  It is a marvelous event where anyone, citizens and tourists alike, can stand up on a stage or a soapbox and speak or yell their opinions as loud as they want to.  The crowd is feisty, enthusiastic, well-informed, and much ready to engage.

We at the Clarion would like to offer a similar forum to all citizens of Coronado in print and on our website.  We urge our readers to submit letters and opinions to the Speaker’s Corner: editor@coronado-clarion.com

Al Graham
Editor

Dear Speaker’s Corner:

A few weeks ago, in a spirit of utter frustration, and after weeks and weeks of reading Mr. Kelly’s weekly column, invariably full of extremist rhetoric, I wrote a letter to the editor of the Coronado Eagle/Journal.  In the letter, I cited my belief in the right to free speech, and asked him, in the cause of fairness, to print my letter.  Of course, my letter made it to the wastebasket file.  As I have heard, so have the letters of many others.

My goal was to suggest that Mr. Kelly be more careful in his fact checking, if any, and to point out that often his passionate assertions are twisted to support his extremist ideology.  For example, he ranted against the confirmation of Elena Kagan.  Ms. Kagan is a woman who is utterly qualified to be a Supreme Court justice by most reasonable accounts.  She is praised at length and not at all like the rude, attack-dog language of Senator Jeff Sessions during the hearings.  Sessions, by the way, had also attacked Sonya Sotomayor much in the same fashion, another qualified and admirable woman.  “Alas!”  They both were confirmed.

In my rejected letter, I pointed out that Jeff Sessions was nominated to the Supreme Court a few Republican-eras back and was SOUNDLY REJECTED by both the Judicial Committee and the Senate.  His attacks on these selections are clearly related to that profound disappointment.

But when KELLY maligned the British health care system, I had to speak out.  My daughter, lives in Wales, lived in London, and has been a long-time resident of the U.K.  I was there when she bore her daughter and was amazed at the quality of the system in regards to childbirth.  It was a thoughtful and professional event.  A nurse actually visits the home of the prospective mother before her time, and then after the birth on her return home.  The nurse comes by again for another follow-up and to ask if there are any questions or if help of any sort is needed.

Later, when Amy needed an emergency heart valve operation, I was there a few days after her surgery.  She was very complimentary about the surgical excellence and the attention that she received.  Before I left California, I was actually able to speak to a nurse on her hospital floor by telephone.  The nurse spoke with me at length regarding her condition.

When Mr. Kelly called the American health care system the “best in the world”, I was compelled to quote two charts I had recently seen in Time magazine as well as the New York Times – hardly fly-by-night publications – who cited U.S. health care as 17^th in the world with U.S. neonatal care, based on mortalities, as 27^th.  Kelly then proceeded to knock “Obamacare” as a joke.  I then wondered if we would soon see him promoting a picture of our president with a Hitler moustache, and/or sipping tea with that party group along with the Mad Hatter.

Recently, Kelly praised the proposition policy of our state as the “will of the people”, when most “thinkers”, particularly those with a sense of law, wish duly elected legislators would serve to put forth the will of the people as our system demands — not the persons with an attitude or an ax to grind, who thrust clipboards at us asking for signatures in front of Wal-Mart or Target, in support of some emotionally based idea.

In closing, I simply have to cite a cartoon from the New Yorker showing a father and his son sitting on the floor and looking under the boy’s bed with a flashlight.  The father’s comment, “See, son, no socialists!”

Sincerely,

Rita Wack