Magicians use distractions to focus attention in order to deceive audiences and get people to believe something amazing happened. In reality the other hand, the one they divert you away from is simply dropping a ball in their pocket or shuffling a deck in an improper fashion.
A story I read today on the left wing site "Crooks and Lairs" does just that. They put the focus of their story on the details they want you to focus on while avoiding the real details.
You can read the story in full HERE, but here some excerpts of the important details...
Let's start with the title, "Unemployed Family Man Joins the Army to Cover His Wife's Ovarian Cancer". So faced with bills and not having a job, this guy takes a job option which in this case was the army in order to pay his bills. But see how it's worded, it implies that joining the army is some horrible choice and is only a last resort for the desperate. Of course this is how the left sees the military. It's not seen as something honorable, instead it's for the scum, the bottom rungs. They show us time and time again this is how they view our military.
You know education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq. - John Kerry
A last resort for those not smart enough for other options.
Moving on into the story...
Chelsea Caudle began signing her text messages this summer with a countdown. At 14 years old, she knew no better way to express what was coming. Day Zero was to be Oct. 7, the day Dad left for Army basic training in Fort Jackson, S.C. He was moving 950 miles from their home in Watertown, 950 miles from Mom.
He was leaving, even though Mom was sick with ovarian cancer. Even though he had been at her side through two long, miserable rounds of chemotherapy. Even though she now faced the likelihood of a third.
In fact, Dad was leaving because Mom was sick.
Read that a few times if you need to. See where the focus is, the poor father having to leave home while the mother and young daughter are left alone and the mother fighting such a horrible illness. Building the case for why we should have government health care, right?
In March, he was laid off from his job as a raw materials coordinator for a plastics company called PolyOne, where he'd worked for 20 years. His severance package had provided several months' salary, but by August the paychecks were winding down. Soon the cost of his family health coverage was going to triple, then a few months after that, nearly triple again. They needed coverage so Mom could fight her cancer.
Dad's solution: a four-year hitch in the Army.
The bolding is from the article and not of my doing. See what they are doing here? By bolding his choice in joining the army and bolding all the negatives about bills going up due to her sickness and her sickness itslef they link the two together as if it's equally as bad.
In the first week of class, one of the teachers asked: What do your parents do?
The question jolted Chelsea back to the shifting ground of her family. Mom was working part time at a Culver's restaurant, preparing for more chemo, worrying about how to pay the bills. In less than six weeks, Dad would enter the Army and her care would be covered.
Again with the bolding, linking the mom having to work part time while preparing for chemo and worrying about paying bills and the dad having to join the army. He HAD to join the army and this is just awful.
The tradeoff was that he would be far away when Mom needed him home, when Chelsea needed him, too. He would miss all of her high school years. The band performances. Prom.
See the focus here? It's not that he found a way to pay his bills in this horrible economic down turn. No. Instead the focus here is that his choice takes him away from home.
Mom and Dad are Michelle and Bill Caudle, high school sweethearts now 40 and 39, respectively. They have three children: Chelsea, the youngest; Alysha, a 21-year-old working at a nearby Holiday Inn; and Little Bill, an 18-year-old ex-high school wrestler.
The Caudles are not fond of politics. Michelle and Bill have paid little attention to the shouting this summer over health care reform. They have not gone to any of the town hall meetings. They are well aware that politicians and interest groups would like to trumpet their story or dismiss it to score points in the debate - and they would just as soon avoid all of that.
They don't want to be used as political "points" but yet that's what is being done here. The left wing are pushing this story to attempt to justify why we need government health insurance. They are using it to put your focus on wanting to help poor people like these.
It isn't until starting 19 paragraphs in that you see the following:
But this year the national story of lost jobs became their story. And the saga of families losing health insurance was about to become theirs, too.
Except that Bill wouldn't let it.
True, he had been interested in the Army for years. And he could always request an emergency leave to come home if Michelle's condition grew dire (Army regulations allow this if a family member's death is imminent).
There buried deep down into the story you see the real issue. Here in the next paragraph you begin to see more of the real issue, the hand they don't want you to focus as much on.
But for weeks before enlisting, Bill had sought other options. He revised his résumé. He answered "help wanted" ads, then watched the companies cut workers instead of hiring them. He interviewed for one job that would have paid $13 an hour - less than half of what he was making at PolyOne. He didn't get the job.
They don't want you to look at the hand asking why can't he pay his bills. They just want to to feel sorry and want you to feel like the government should help him so he doesn't have to leave.
And for the final they wrap up with this:
Chelsea learned about her dad's decision when Michelle picked her up from school. It had been a bad day already: a problem with one of her teachers, then she had to do the mile run.
"I have something to tell you," her mom said after Chelsea slid into her seat. "Your dad enlisted in the Army. There's more: He'll be gone for four years."
Chelsea started to cry.
Poor little girl crying because her daddy is going away. Tragic yes?
The real story here can be summed up simply as follows.
Dad loses job and finds another one by joining the army in order to pay bills.
That's it. He was unemployed and had bills just like any other family in America and he did what he had to in order to take personal responsibility and put food and money on his families table. This father should be viewed as a hero and a true example of personal responsibility, not a tragic figure.
Instead in liberal land they would rather this family get "free" health care so he wouldn't need to resort to joining the army. Of course it would also mean he would have less need to find work right away since there would be no need for personal responsibility. Why work when your needs are just given to you right? That means more money will be taken from my table and tables of other hard working families to pay his health insurance leaving less for us to feed our own families with. The companies that would have hired him continue to have declining sales because those of us still working have more and more of our incomes taken from us leaving us unable to purchase the things we otherwise would have. And the cycle continues down.
If the government wants to help people like this find jobs where they can stay close to home and have good benefits then they need to allow the rest of us to keep enough of our money to purchase and create the jobs.
There are plenty of private sector jobs that also include traveling and would have taken him away from his family but you don't hear about the traveling sales person who is able to bring in six figures but has to leave his family three out of every four weeks in order to do it. You don't hear about the business man being sent on business trip after business trip to far away locations. Or the computer engineer having to work 60 hours or more a week just to meet the deadlines demanded of him because the company had to let the rest of his department go. No, these stories don't bring about the same emotion as the one above.
They want to put the focus on things that like magic will make you feel like you want to pay the bills of other people and away from the discussion asking why people can't pay them in the first place.
Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 08:43AM