78-12-A7

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Left and Right

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.		Details Batch Number 78-12-A7 Production Date 08/07/1978 Book/Page RPtV-355 Audio Youtube? No
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