Of free choices and their meanings (Jan. 18)
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
Some of us will be sending checks to help the Haitians, and some of us won’t. Some of us are texting to help the Haitians. If you send a certain text, a $10 donation shows up on your next telephone bill. Presumably, once you pay that telephone bill, the $10 will be sent to Haiti. And then again, some of us aren‘t going to do any texting for Haiti at all.
It is a matter of free choice.
A wealthy San Francisco businessman whipped out his checkbook, wrote a check for $100,000 and sent it off to be used to help the Haitians almost before the ground in Haiti had stopped shaking. For his trouble, he was criticized by some who didn’t think he had given enough, and who said his money was tainted. Of course, his critics didn’t say how much they had given. Maybe they didn’t give anything. Maybe they just like to criticize wealthy people, and this gives them the chance.
It is a matter of free choice.
It looks like the bison in Yellowstone National Park might have made a few too many free choices a few years ago, and now there are too many of them. Eighty-eight too many of them, apparently. Park officials put out the word that as a result, 88 bison might have to eat bullets this year, and right away, a bison billionaire offered to save them.
Ted Turner said he would take the bison, and keep them on his big Montana ranch for five years, or until the park or somebody else came along and got them. The only thing he wants for this is to keep 95 percent of the offspring — offspring that would never materialize if the park’s plan to kill the 88 were carried out.
That is Turner’s free choice.
Turner-haters, of course, are foaming at their mouths. They aren’t offering to take the buffalo themselves, but they are offering plenty of criticism. Which is their free choice, too.
I wonder: How would the Haitians choose? How about the buffalo?
