In the news last week was an article about the deep cuts the State of Texas has made in the safety net of funding to access health care. In an effort to curtail women’s access to abortions, a religious idea, all kinds of other routine medical services have been blocked, such as cervical screenings and mammograms that can detect cancer at early treatable stages.

Personally, this issue affects me as a husband with daughters and grandchildren, several of whom live in the Dallas area. Beyond that, I hope every woman in Texas from El Paso to Beaumont talks to her female friends about the importance of their vote and drags their boyfriend, husband or significant other to the polls insisting, as women can do, that he vote for a change in Texas government and laws.

It is up to the people who are being harmed by the right wing to stand up themselves and do something about the situation and that means registering and voting.

Upon posting my general feelings on Facebook one reader commented.

Charlie, these people are not being harmed by the right. They are being harmed by the left who has turned many into dependent people that don’t know how to take care of themselves. What a cruel thing to do to people.

Followed by another reader.

Cruelty is dying of a disease or cancer that could have been detected early and treated. Denying healthcare and food to people is cruel. Denying livable wages is cruel. Denying equal pay for equal work is cruel. Cruelty is watching the right wing declare corporations as people, their governors gathering in Las Vegas to prostitute themselves to a billionaire geezer and then blaming the poor for being poor.

Oh Judy, since I don’t know you I’ll try not to make references to where your head is perched, but you have swallowed a load of right-wing propaganda and there really isn’t any easy way to explain to you how wrong your ideas are.

Would you say that a single mother abandoned by her husband, with two or more children struggling on a minimal salary job and wanting to have the opportunity for some health care at the local Planned Parenthood clinic to make sure she will be alive to raise her children was harmed by the political left and turned into a dependent person ? Or are she and her children victims of circumstances somewhat beyond their control?

That is the sort of person that I know dwells in that never-never land of crushing poverty, missed opportunity and is now being deprived of the right to vote. Now madam, I know of many people in similar situations and obviously you do not. The wonderful thing is that I know of several who have climbed out of that situation and are now functioning citizens who have fair jobs, pay taxes and are educating their children.

All they needed was a little help and a fair chance at a critical time in their lives, something that your philosophy does not extend to them.

I doubt my words will change your mind as people like you prefer to stay inside the bubble of BS mountain where the myths of the welfare queen who drives a Cadillac to the gub’ment office and really manages to live like royalty on food stamps and section eight housing, myths that are like the web of garbage that flows around and around the North Pacific gyre in circles, smothering any fresh ideas that might light up your closed mind.

Here is a test. Do you recall how many right-wing political commentators virtually swore that the ACA would be a failure, that it was: “… a train wreck…”, to quote John Boehner, and that they would never get the 6,000,000 or 7,000,000 people signed up through the website by March 31st? But they were wrong and other than whining about the books being cooked they have unapologetically shut up about it. Why were they wrong?

These same people sat there and confidently predicted that Mitt Romney would win the election by a 4 or 5% vote margin. But they were wrong, and not just by a little bit either. Why is that?

Others from the same part of the political spectrum insisted that Saddam Hussein was building a nuclear weapon and was an al Qaida supporter, a few of whom still peddle that same lime of BS even after it being proven totally false.  But once the country was “liberated” inspectors, military as well as civilian, roamed the hillsides and down under the cities for weeks looking for the non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction finding none. The prophets of doom were wrong. Why?

If I were listening to people who have been consistently wrong over a series of decisions and predictions, I’d have the intellectual curiosity to try to figure out why that was so, and would quietly do some independent research. I’d also be very suspicious about any other predictions or statements that that source made until he, or she, or they, had established a better track record.

I would go on but more than likely you have snapped down the lid on your thinking by now and decided that I am just making this up. But if you want to get on the right side of history there is a chance but you’ll have to suspend blind belief and check out facts on your own. As Ronnie Reagan often said “….. doveryai, no proveryai….”, the former is worthless without the latter.