A Common American Of Uncommon Courage

The New York Times ran this editorial on Sunday in praise of Laura Berg, a VA nurse who received the new PEN/Katherine Anne Porter First Amendment Award.

As the Times tells us…

The PEN American Center, the literary organization committed to free expression, is honoring an American most people in this country have never read or even heard of: Laura Berg. She is a psychiatric nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital who was threatened with a sedition investigation after she wrote a letter to the editor denouncing the Bush administration’s bungling of Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq war.

That’s right, sedition: inciting rebellion against the government. We suppose nothing should surprise us in these days of government zealotry. But the horror and the shame of that witch hunt should shock everyone.

…

Her superiors at the hospital soon alerted the Federal Bureau of Investigation and impounded her office computer, where she keeps the case files of war-scarred veterans she treats. Then she received an official warning in which a Veterans Affairs investigator intoned that her letter “potentially represents sedition.”

It took civil rights litigators and Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico to “act forcefully” in reminding the government of the Constitution and her right to free speech. The Department of Veterans Affairs retreated then finally apologized to the shaken Ms. Berg.

After I read this, I found this Truthout article about the origin of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to learn more about how “sedition” could apply in this context, and the article tells us that the Acts were written because we were upset with France (sound familiar?) over their attempt to extract a bribe from three of our emissaries who were meeting with that country to get them to stop attacking our ships (France was mad because we’d signed a treaty with the British without their knowledge…yes, there was actually a time when we weren’t a superpower, though, sadly, we may see that day again).

As the Truthout article tells us…

The Sedition Act made it unlawful for any person to write, print, publish, or speak anything "false, scandalous and malicious" about the government, either Congress or the Executive, if it was done with the intent to defame or to bring the government "into contempt or disrepute," or to excite the hatred of the people against the United States.

Does this remind you of John Ashcroft's December 6th (2002) rant before Congress in which he equated civil liberties with aid to terrorists and declared that any public debate would "give ammunition to America's enemies"?

The Alien and Sedition Laws were a blot on the democratic record of this country. They were not used to protect against dangerous aliens. The Alien Act was used by Federalists to keep out of Congress qualified Democratic candidates who had only recently become U.S. citizens (such as Swiss immigrant, Albert Gallatin, who two years later became Secretary of the Treasury under President Thomas Jefferson). The Sedition Law was used to arrest, prosecute, and jail Democratic newspaper editors who dared to oppose the Administration.

And by the way, the Albert Gallatin award, as Wikipedia notes here, is “the United States Department of the Treasury's highest career service award.” I know, because my father received it shortly before he retired from government service.

But more to the point of the post, I think we should all ponder Laura Berg’s example briefly and see how we emulate her courageous act, recalling the following (as the Times tells us)…

Ms. Berg identified herself as a V.A. nurse when, soon after Katrina’s horrors, she sent her impassioned letter to The Alibi, a paper in Albuquerque. “I am furious with the tragically misplaced priorities and criminal negligence of this government,” she wrote. “We need to wake up and get real here, and act forcefully to remove a government administration playing games of smoke and mirrors and vicious deceit.”

She received the award last night, and I sincerely hope that a splendid time was had by all.