President Deserves Respect

The discontent being expressed about our country and our president is quite disturbing. The lack of respect shown to our president by parents who did not permit their children to hear his speech was evidence of teaching disrespect for authority with parental approval. Respect is the core of family values.

There are those who make obscene statements and compare our president to the communist and Nazi parties. I have been to Russia and have seen six-story apartment buildings where everyone lives in the towns and only a select few are allowed to own property. There is no free enterprise and one does not question authority, let alone protest against it. We have only to read about the Holocaust and the extermination of millions of people by Hitler and his regime to remind us of the Nazi horrors.

The Social Security Act was passed in 1935, and signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with very little Republican support. In 1965, the Medicare program was passed during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson under the same conditions. Our citizens awaited eagerly the time when they will be eligible for both benefits. Neither program has proven to be meddlesome or intrusive in our lives, as some charge.

We should question the propaganda aired every day by the right wing media, which creates confusion and succeeds in developing a culture of hatred in the process. The framers of our Constitution were concerned not only about our freedoms, but the tyranny of the mob. Mob mentality can have disastrous results.

It is time we think about the universal need of health care and not of partisan politics or racial bias. We have a very capable president who is well-educated in constitutional law and who has served as a professor of law at the University of Chicago law school. Perhaps we should allow him to do the job he promised and we elected him to do.

Hazel Morrell
Bluff City, Tenn.