Letter from Lindell Cline
Book Review – November 1995 – Colorado Central Magazine
Dear Ed Quillen:
Although I truly appreciate your review or critique of my book Me and the Law [published in the September, 1995, edition of Colorado Central], I must take issue with its obvious implication that anger is some unacceptable and does not allow me to be reasonable.
I readily admit that I am angry, although rage is too strong a word; but how often has anyone who was not angry been able to significantly change an established bureaucracy? Is significant change to an established bureaucracy even possible without anger? If after exhaustive study I recognize or honestly believe that a multitude of bureaucracies are destroying everything that millions of Americans have spent or given their lives to build and defend, is anger unreasonable?
I have never expressed anger even approaching the anger regularly expressed in both words and deeds by numerous groups who have often been hailed as heroes by the media. I have never bashed beer kegs with an axe, driven steel spikes into trees, beaten workers who crossed a picket line to feed their families, killed abortion doctors, rioted, called for violent revolution, or said that in order to be truly feminine women must bring out their inner bitch. I am not nearly as angry as any of these. I just cast a wider net.
I readily admit that my philosophy is outside the mainstream of political thought. A few hundred years ago, saying the world was round was well outside the mainstream of political thought, but that never kept it from being both right and reasonable. When those who were both right and reasonable were prosecuted and persecuted by a bureaucracy that steadfastly refused to recognize reason, they were no doubt more than a little angry.
The issue of health-care reform was used to question my reason. I very clearly pointed out in my book that the so-called reform I was referring to would have been nothing but a continuation and expansion of the present bureaucracy, leading ultimately to fully socialized medicine, carried out by the same group responsible for our present system, although perhaps not by the same individuals. More of the same is not reform. I bear no anger toward those who might truly reform health care.
As to the length of my book: If the authors of The Bell Curve could use more than 800 pages to reach a couple of conclusions that I consider unreasonable, then surely 400-plus pages to reach dozens of conclusions is not excessive, whether those conclusions are reasonable or not.
Perhaps it will ultimately be determined that I am not reasonable, but that should reasonably be left to the individual reader.
Lindell Cline
Buena Vista
