Folks screaming and yelling at the town halls are nuts and they are worthy of the mocking, but not everything they say is stupid.
Take the suggestion that legislation be written at a high school level.
At Specter's morning town hall today an attendee suggested that these bills be written at a 10th grade level or high school level. The suggestion was greeted with ridicule in a couple of diary comments, but I'm wondering if this guy was not right.
Think about it.
Shouldn't the legislation that governs ours lives be written in a way that the majority of citizens can understand without the help of experts and a couple of lawyers? To me democracy works best when its citizens are engaged and to be engaged the language of our legislation needs to be accessible to the majority of the population. Writing bills at a mid high school level would allow for complexity without a ridiculous amount of legalese.
Mid high school level reading lists include George Orwell, Ayn Rand, Mary Shelly, John Steinbeck, Ray Bradbury, and Shakespeare. Within this country there is a large minority of folks who read below a 9th grade level and while we need to do better teaching citizens to read, we also need to make sure that folks are not left out due to an inability to understand the bills their representatives in Washington are voting on.
How much harder would it be to manipulate the undereducated if they could actually understand what is in bills being voted on in Congress...for that matter more of our Congress Critters would know what they were voting on.
This is very personal because my son (17), while pretty brilliant, also has learning disabilities that make reading a very hard process. He is very interested in our democratic process and even tried to read some of the house bill, but, well you guys know how hard these things can be to make sense of.
That breaks my heart.
He wants to be an informed citizen, he wants to take part, but in the end he is locked out of one of the basic duties of an informed voter which is to be able to know what you or your representatives are voting on.
We need a government that is accessible to all Americans not just some of us.
(Yes, I do know about assistive technologies and he does use them, but that is besides the point.)