If this new Jonesboro Rule were to become generally applied, then a certain someone might find himself in serious trouble.
In case you missed news reports last week at Talk Business and on television station KAIT in Jonesboro, the aforementioned rule essentially provides as follows: Thou shalt not take money from someone with whom you disagree on political and social issues.
The point seems to be parlaying political polarization into economic ruination.
Our story begins with Michael Bloomberg, the very-rich former mayor of New York City who holds certain views not accepted in Jonesboro, to wit:
• We ought to apply the same registration rules to gun sales at gun shows as to gun sales at gun stores.
• We ought to honor the law of the land and permit the right of women to choose abortion in the early stage of pregnancy.
• We shouldn't sell super-sized sugary soft drinks because people can get fat too conveniently. We ought to make people buy two or three smaller sodas before they can hope to get that fat.
As a rich liberal do-gooder from the rarefied environs of New York City, the busybody Bloomberg has founded and seeded certain foundations that seek to throw money around the hinterlands for supposedly altruistic notions.
One is called Cities of Service. It passes grants to municipal jurisdictions--cities--that design qualifying programs using volunteers to meet needs.
It's one of those vaunted win-win-win deals--you get a rich guy's money for free; you spur volunteer work by your citizens; you fashion from this volunteer service some locally helpful service or product.
In Little Rock--a heathen Democratic jurisdiction, to be sure--a grant was accepted by which youth volunteers built and maintained gardens to grow fresh produce for school cafeterias.
That amounts to liberal-minded social engineering, of course. You use do-gooder money and government to force children to garden, which should be the parents' choice and responsibility, don't you think? Meantime you seek to effect healthier school lunches.
That's a notion grounded in the same nanny-state affront by which soft-drink size would be regulated in usurpation of a parent's God-given right to serve his child Dr Pepper in a washtub if that's what he and the youngster preferred.
So a proposal came before the Jonesboro City Council to accept an invitation to apply for a $30,000 grant from Cities of Service.
The city council said no by an overwhelming vote of 10-to-2.
Alderman Gene Vance, leading the way, said he could not sell his soul.
The potentially broader implications are troubling, to understate.
If indeed your soul is sold if you accept money from anyone with whom you hold a disagreement, then I know someone who finds himself in one heck of a soul-less mess.
I refer to the columnist now columnizing herein.
My main money for paying bills comes from a newspaper that publishes editorials I usually disagree with.
By the Jonesboro Rule, I would decline in the interest of my soul any monetized association therewith.
For that matter, I know of no newspaper or media outlet owned by anyone in Arkansas who agrees with all or much of my passé liberal claptrap.
I might go to work writing speeches for an agreeable politician, except that the November election left Arkansas with no viable politician who shares any increment of my views.
The only other remuneration-producing skill I remotely possess is mowing grass and edging lawns, having had weekly practice for decades on my own property through spring, summer and early fall. So I might do that commercially, so long as I limited my customer base to the Hillcrest section of Little Rock where I might best hope to find homeowners holding no view contrary to mine.
Failing that, I could go on the government dole except that I disagree with my federal government on certain matters of war. And I disagree with my state government more generally now that the Koch brothers have purchased it.
I could throw myself on the mercy of churches so long as they weren't Southern Baptists, Churches of Christ, Pentecostals, nondenominational evangelicals, Methodists (with whom I disagree on lotteries) or Catholics (with whom I disagree on abortion, though I sure do get a kick out of the new pope).
So to conclude: Under the Jonesboro Rule if generally applied, my very existence would rely on the benevolence of some, but not all, Presbyterians, and apparently all Episcopalians.
Maybe Lutherans. I've never known much about the Lutherans. And I suspect I would be able to accept Jewish assistance.
Otherwise, the Jonesboro Rule would put me homeless on the street, asking this question of passers-by: Do you support the private-option form of Medicaid expansion, and, if so, could you spare a dime?
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 12/09/2014