Editing 78-12-A7 (section)

=== Transcript ===
Seven years ago Karl Magnuson was a professor on the faculty of
a well-known state university. He was secure and well-paid, but
unsatisfied. He simply did not want to spend the rest of his life
as a comfortable faculty member of a taxpayer supported institution.

So Karl Magnuson dropped out of academia. He went back to the
little community of Topaz, Michigan and became a farmer . He learned
to live independently, close to the land, and to participate in
community life. He had hardly arrived, however, when he learned that
his little community in the great pine forests of Michigan's Upper
Peninsula was under almost constant assault from various levels of
government.

First the regional planning commission, made up of appointees and
bureaucrats not accountable to the people, was about to impose
a comprehensive plan on his area which would concentrate all future
growth and economic development into two selected "growth centers" --
leaving Karl's community in a permanent "no opportunity" zone. Karl
and his neighbors fought back, and were promptly attacked as "right
wingers" for challenging the sacred cow of regional planning.

Then, while that fight was still going on, another threat appeared.
The U.S. Forest Service announced its intention to spray the forests
with a chemical defoliant, by helicopter. Karl and his neighbors
got an injunction to prevent the spraying of their forests and homes.
They were immediately recognized as concerned environmentalists.

Soon the U.S. Navy appeared with a plan to construct a vast
communications array in Karl's township. Karl and his neighbors
fought back again. This time a prominent state official branded
them "Communists." Then the Forest Service returned with a proposal to
designate hundreds of thousands of acres in Karl's country as
permanent wilderness. Again the same people fought back. Now they
found themselves labeled as greedy exploiters of the forests.
Remember, these were the same people who had just been called
"environmentalists" for opposing the toxic sparying of the same
forests!

The former professor wondered how it was that he and his neighbors
seemed to alternate continuously between the political Left and Right
in the view of the mass media and government officials. Finally, he
began to see through it all. "The Left-Right opposition functions as
a smokescreen that obscures and diverts people's attention from a real
and terrifying process that has developed with frightening rapidity
in capitalist and socialist countries alike," he says ... The real
threat is the enormous enlargement and the decisive centralization of
all the means of power and decision." Now, he adds, the instruments
of control reach dangerously far into the lives and activities of
ordinary citizens.

For Karl Magnuson of Topaz, Michigan, the real issue can no longer
be discussed in terms of Left and Right. The real issue is how to
reverse the flow of power and control to ever more remote institutions,
and to restore that power to the individual, the family, and the local
community. Millions of other Americans, in both the small towns and
great cities of this land, are steadily coming to the same conclusion. 

This is Ronald Reagan.

Thanks for listening.
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