Mountain Views News          Saturday, April 13, 2013

16

LEFT TURN/RIGHT TURN

 Mountain Views News Saturday, April 13, 2013 


HOWARD Hays As I See It

GREG Welborn

MARGARET THATCHER, A 
HERO FOR OUR TIME

“If [gun laws] need to be 
tightened up, or if we think that 
it could prevent anything more 
like this, then of course that will 
be considered.”

 He was armed with a handgun 
and two legally-purchased semi-
automatic rifles. Sixteen people 
were shot and killed, including 
the gunman’s mother, and fifteen 
injured before the killer turned the gun on 
himself.

 About a year later, the country stiffened 
its gun laws; semi-automatic weapons were 
outlawed, new restrictions placed on shotguns 
and ammunition, registration requirements were 
tightened and cops had more leeway to deny 
permits to those deemed unfit.

 The massacre took place in the Hungerford 
area of Berkshire, England in 1987. The new gun 
law got through Parliament under the leadership 
of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, quoted 
above.

 I’ve wondered how Ronald Reagan would fare 
with today’s corporate-controlled Republicans. 
Here’s a president who argued it was unfair for a 
bus driver to pay taxes on his earned income at a 
higher rate than what a Wall-Streeter pays on his 
capital gains. I can’t imagine many Democrats, 
let alone Republicans, openly taking that position 
today.

 I wondered the same about Margaret Thatcher, 
who, in addition to overseeing one of the U.K.’s 
most significant gun control measures in a 
generation, also accepted scientific fact as being 
scientific fact. She was one of the earliest leaders 
to sound the warning on climate change; “The 
danger of global warming is as yet unseen but 
real enough for us to make changes and sacrifices 
so that we do not live at the expense of future 
generations.”

 Thatcher remained an ardent supporter of her 
country’s National Health Service, which, unlike 
President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, actually 
is “socialized medicine”; “I believed that the 
NHS was a service of which we could genuinely 
be proud. It delivered a high quality of care . . 
. and at a reasonably modest unit cost, at least 
compared with some insurance-based systems.”

 When discussing means to address climate 
change, or getting firearms off the street, P.M. 
Thatcher would often use the word, “sensible”. 
The question is why it’s so hard here at home to 
enact measures 90% of us agree are, at the very 
least, “sensible”.

 The main reason is we’re dealing with an 
industry which, according to National Shooting 
Sports Foundation, has an annual $32 billion 
footprint on our economy (a figure approximate 
to what’s spent yearly on the arts), and is 
determined to maintain it.

 Start with $30 million spent since 1990 buying 
Congress through corporate front groups like 
the NRA; $4.2 million for the 2012 election cycle 
alone, with 96% going to Republicans. Then 
create and disseminate talking points about how 
Obama wants to take away everyone’s guns, or at 
least establish a nation-wide registry of owners so 
things will be in place when he decides the time’s 
right to impose Sharia law.

 
Yeah, it’s crazy – but the pros orchestrating the 
propaganda do their homework and follow the 
polls, like one last month from Public Policy 
Polling, showing that when targeting those who 
last year voted for Mitt Romney, you’re dealing 
with a crowd in which 61% believe global 
warming is a hoax, 36% believe Saddam Hussein 
was involved with 9/11, and 22% believe Barack 
Obama is the “Anti-Christ”. Clearly, these are 
folks who’ll buy into most anything.

 The threat to wavering Republicans is that 
if they don’t fall into line, if they show signs of 
putting the interests of constituents over those of 
arms manufacturers, they risk being “primaried”. 
The lobbyists would invest millions putting 
up challengers in “safe” Republican districts, 
mobilize the base and guarantee a formidable 
turnout of those determined to deny reelection 
to anyone seen as siding with the Anti-Christ in 
the White House intent on taking their guns.

 Keeping guns out of the hands of unstable 
people could have a serious impact on that $32 
billion industry. Keeping them out of the hands 
of unstable countries could cut into the estimated 
(by the Stockholm International Peace Research 
Institute) $8.8 billion in annual arms exports 
from the U.S.

 Earlier this month the United Nations voted 
overwhelmingly to approve a treaty calling 
for a “background check” for nations seeking 
arms abroad. As reported in the N.Y. Times, it 
calls for “sales to be evaluated on whether the 
weapons will be used to break humanitarian law, 
foment genocide or war crimes, abet terrorism 
or organized crime or slaughter women and 
children.” Particularly threatening to arms 
exporters, it calls for public disclosure of the 
countries and regimes they deal with.

 Ours was one of the 154 countries in support. 
The only three votes against were cast by Iran, 
Syria and North Korea. Ratification in the Senate 
appears unlikely, though, as the NRA and their 
servants in Congress have sided with Iran, Syria 
and North Korea. In a recent fundraising appeal, 
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) confides, “I don’t know 
about you, but watching anti-American globalists 
plot against our Constitution makes me sick ... 
Ultimately, UN bureaucrats will stop at nothing 
to register, ban and CONFISCATE firearms 
owned by private citizens like YOU.” 

 Of course, the treaty only deals with international 
sales - but if you’re going to side with Iran, Syria 
and North Korea, you have to make stuff up and 
target your appeal to the gullible and fearful.

 Both Reagan and Thatcher were divisive 
figures, and their policies arguably caused great 
harm. They governed, though, in service to 
their countries, not to corporate benefactors. 
When they spoke of the advance of freedom and 
fall of Communism, they appealed to our best 
nature and highest aspirations. When protecting 
accessibility to militarized firepower for the 
deranged here and abroad, however, the only 
option is to appeal to the basest fears and lowest 
common denominator. 

 And regardless of politics, current efforts to 
prevent measures from even coming to the floor 
for debate and a vote cannot be described 
as conservatism, but only as cowardice.

 
With the death this week of Margaret Thatcher, 
former Prime Minister of England, the West has 
lost one of its greatest leaders. She not only saved 
her nation, but provided support for our own 
President Reagan as he toiled to save America 
from the depths of collapse and despair which 
had already beset England. For this, we, as 
Americans, owe her a debt of gratitude which we 
can never repay, and it is for this that I dedicate 
this week’s column.

 Margaret Thatcher came to power as Prime 
Minister in 1979 after Britain’s “winter of 
discontent”. More than a political slogan, the 
term aptly described a time when everything in 
England was falling apart. There was nothing left 
to cherish or celebrate. Inflation hit double-digit 
levels, unemployment skyrocketed, the economy 
was shrinking, 98% income tax rates had 
driven entrepreneurs to the brink of collective 
bankruptcy, the public unions had paralyzed a 
nation with an almost year-long strike, and the 
military had retrenched from guarantor of pax 
Britannica to beggar of spare parts to keep its jeeps 
rolling. Britain was written off by most leaders in 
the West and East, alike, as ungovernable and a 
has-been nation.

 Into this stepped a woman of indomitable 
spirit and unflinching faith in the average citizen. 
Externally, she also faced an ascending Soviet 
Union which threatened to overrun and subsume 
Western Europe politically and morally, if not 
actually militarily. Many in Western Europe had 
simply given up on themselves, but not Margaret 
Thatcher. 

 Margaret Thatcher knew instinctively that 
freedom was not only good for the soul but good 
for the success of a nation as well. In her own 
memoir she commented on “the great complex 
romance of international trade which recruited 
people from all over the world to ensure that a 
family in Grantham could have on its table rice 
from India, coffee form Kenya, and sugar from 
the West Indies”. She loosened the regulations 
and taxes that were strangling her nation, and 
she killed inflation. She privatized scores of 
industries, thus turning losers, which required 
support from the treasury, into winners, which 
contributed to the treasury with new tax 
revenues born of economic success and growth. 
Her actions turned massive government deficits 
into a surplus by the time she left office. Along 
the way, she allowed the average citizen to 
become stockholders, and thus stakeholders, in 
British industry, thereby allowing them to enjoy 
the fruits of economic recovery many times 
larger than what ever could have been received 
from government handouts had the government 
retained control and ownership of more than a 
third of the economy.

 Thatcher was tested keenly when the 
military junta running Argentina decided to 
take advantage of what they perceived to be the 
weakened state of Britain’s military capabilities. 
Perhaps they were right and, under a leader of 
less courage than Margaret Thatcher, they might 
have succeeded in their invasion of the Falkland 
Islands. But Margaret Thatcher stood tall and did 
not abandon the rights and freedoms of British 
citizens living on British soil. To many politicians, 
the plight of this small band of citizens wouldn’t 
have been worth much of a political fight, let 
alone a full scale military fight thousands of miles 
from home. 

 That, of course, was 
exactly what was wrong 
with Britain when 
Margaret Thatcher 
came along. England 
did not respect its 
own traditions, history 
or principles. Too 
many politicians had 
shown in the past their 
willingness to compromise with the public’s 
freedoms, well-being and place in the world. The 
world’s bad guys and bullies noticed, but they also 
noticed that Margaret Thatcher was different.

 Margaret Thatcher stood up against unions 
at home, the junta in Argentina, and the 
international left which sought to derail the 
placement of U.S. cruise missiles in England and 
Europe to counter the Russian SS-20 missiles 
already stationed in Eastern Europe. Everyone 
underestimated Thatcher and came away from 
the experience more deeply respecting her 
strength and Britain’s reinvigorated place on the 
world stage.

 To her countrymen, Thatcher rescued a dying 
economy. She turned economic contraction 
into U.S.-style growth rates which lifted 
incomes at all levels. At every economic strata, 
personal income rose. Internationally, though, 
Thatcher’s contribution dwarfed her domestic 
accomplishments.

 Margaret Thatcher dissented strongly from 
the conventional wisdom of the day, which held 
that accommodation with the Soviet Union was 
the only viable strategy. 40+ plus years of such 
a cynical view had consigned a generation, and 
millions, of Eastern Europeans to a life of misery 
and neglect. The Soviets, like the Argentines, 
thought she would also blink and concede critical 
points. They, like the Argentines, were wrong. 
While she was willing to deal with the Soviets, 
she was nonetheless strident in defending the 
principles of freedom and insisting that the 
Soviet Union could be defeated. No longer, she 
offered, would the millions living behind the iron 
curtain be consigned to poverty and serfdom. 
She pushed the case for constructive engagement 
and while vigorously pushing the moral and 
political case for freedom. The fall of the Berlin 
Wall and the peaceful dismantling of the Soviet 
Union are as attributable to Margaret Thatcher’s 
courage and conviction as they are to Ronald 
Reagan’s. 

 Margaret Thatcher came on to the political 
stage at one of its most trying moments – a time 
when the principles of the West were threatened 
and mocked. She left that stage with the cause 
of freedom and democracy once again a goal to 
which millions can realistically aspire.

About the author: Gregory J. Welborn is a 
freelance writer and has spoken to several civic 
and religious organizations on cultural and 
moral issues. He lives in the Los Angeles area 
with his wife and 3 children and is active in the 
community. He can be reached gregwelborn2@
gmail.com 


THEME: EARTH DAY

ACROSS

1. It’s a wrap

6. *A call to being green, acr.

9. Fog effect

13. Solo

14. Mother, sister or daughter

15. “_____ truly”

16. Teacher’s pet, e.g.

17. Radio knob

18. Consume

19. Bungle

21. *Biology branch

23. Long time

24. Niels Bohr’s study object

25. Cleopatra’s killer?

28. Christening acquisition

30. On which Romney and Obama 
were found

35. It must go on?

37. *Like animal near extinction

39. Marilyn Munster to Herman 
Munster, e.g.

40. Delhi dress

41. Sends by posts

43. Imitator

44. Are not

46. Mosquito net fabric

47. End of the line

48. Noontime

50. Give certain impression

52. DNA transmitter

53. Boll weevil, e.g.

55. Car display

57. *Garden helper

61. Iron Man’s robotic nemesis

64. French farewell

65. Galley tool

67. Vociferously praises

69. Choral composition with sacred 
lyrics

70. Fix a game

71. He lives on Sesame Street

72. *You do it to your garden’s soil 
before planting

73. “... ___ he drove out of sight”

74. Homes are often tested for this

DOWN

1. Maple syrup precursor

2. Reunion attendee

3. Lariat, e.g.

4. Used in some liquors

5. *Earth Day founder

6. Please get back to me

7. 17th letter of Greek alphabet

8. Rent again

9. Delivered by a mare

10. *Its emissions are regulated

11. Pharma product

12. Grammy of sports

15. Tower of London guard

20. Render harmless

22. *Corn holder, often left behind 
to protect soil quality

24. Most aerial

25. Indian state

26. Harry Belafonte’s daughter

27. Focused or riveted

29. “Yes, ___”

31. One who fabricates

32. _____ colony, middle ages

33. *An earthly body

34. *Earth to ancient Romans

36. *Prop pusher

38. Do it “or ____!”

42. Beach souvenir

45. To give up or bow out

49. Up and down nod

51. *______ earth

54. Mercantile establishment

56. Kate Middleton’s head gear

57. Barack’s David

58. One wafting

59. Possible indoor allergy cause

60. Voyeur’s glance

61. Impulse

62. “____ your manners”

63. Assortment

66. *Clean ___ Act

68. Congressional title