Greg Bean’s “Concerned Citizens” piece in the Feb. 22 issue of Tri-Town News (” ‘Concerned Citizen’ is Still Busy Writing Letters”) was interesting despite its snarky and mean comments about people who might have very good reasons for being concerned and very good reasons for wanting to remain anonymous apart from the cowardice he so blithely attributed to them. His policy of never publishing letters from anonymous sources is somewhat hypocritical (I don’t see names and hometowns appended to all of the positions taken by editorialists in his papers, for example), but at least it’s defensible.
It wasn’t until I read the last section of his column that I finally understood his animus against “concerned citizen.” As anxious as he ap-parently is to char-acterize any attempt, by radio personalities in this case and legislators and very sensibly concerned citizens in earlier of his columns, to rid the country of alien lawbreakers as racist or bigoted, I couldn’t quite put my finger on the source of his irritation.
Bean’s valiantly non-anonymous stance in favor of making sure that the “day laborers waiting in the cold” in muster zones don’t get “arrested and sent back to where they came from” has to be based on something.
That something is not common sense, since in his own words he readily admits that “We’ve got a real problem with illegal immigrants in this state, and nobody would deny that.” (He should stop that “nobody would deny” nonsense, please; his own paper, along with our Monmouth-Ocean dailies and weeklies, has carried a steady stream of pro-criminal propaganda that gives the lie to that statement, and he knows it).
So what could it be that sets Bean off? Could it be an aversion to someone anonymously tipping off the feds? Possibly, but I don’t remember having seen him rail against that before. Maybe I missed it, or maybe he actually favors the idea of contacting the feds about counterfeit currency or bank robberies, anonymously or not, and decries only providing them with info about alien invaders. I don’t know.
I agree with him though, about the relative uselessness of the “Operation La Cuca Gotcha” campaign favored by the radio people. There is no doubt that federal law enforcement personnel, under the thumbs of obvious traitors like the mope currently in the White House and the equally traitorous disgrace who preceded him, aren’t going to do anything about the destructive invasions we’re suffering.
Much more effective would be a concerted program by justifiably concerned citizens to make sure that neither they nor their neighbors do any business with employers of (or caterers to) illegal aliens and, just as importantly, that they let those employers and invader enablers know about it. But I digress; that’s for another time.
In the meantime, maybe Bean could explain to me and the other readers offended by his patently alien-stroking writings how reporting illegalities to the proper but feckless authorities can possible qualify as “lynch mob mentality.” He doesn’t have to bother to explain his references to “bigotry” and “racism”; those words obviously are part and parcel of his stock anti-American screed.
In the end I believe that it’s the “citizen” part of “concerned citizen” that bothers Bean. It implies a distinction between legal and illegal residents and the way they should be treated, and he doesn’t like that. He should be careful about how he throws the “c” word around. If used often enough maybe the apathetic among us will begin to rebel against the fact that the value of their citizenship is being flushed away by our wicked rulers and their allies: people like Greg Bean.
Neal Pronek
Farmingdale