By Dan Proft
Social media provides the means to have conversations with people you may otherwise have never met, as well as with people you wish you would have otherwise never met.
I place SEIU Illinois State Council Executive Director Jerry Morrison in both categories.
On the one hand, Mr. Morrison is life imitating Roman Moroni from the film Johnny Dangerously, a profane lout who, paraphrasing, abuses everything he encounters including the English language.
Mr. Morrison and his friends at SEIU make sport out of pushing around disabled children. A few short years ago, it was Mr. Morrison who attempted to intervene between the parents of disabled children and their children by forcing public sector unionization on private home health care workers (thankfully he failed).
On the other hand, the recklessness with which Mr. Morrison empties his bile ducts can occasionally produce an important, if fleeting, moment of candor.
Such a moment occurred last week when Mr. Morrison chose to opine in response to a post I made on my Facebook page with his customary bellowing that everyone from me to Bob Woodward are “crackpots,” “whackos,” “nutjobs,” and the like. This is what Mr. Morrison calls “discussing an issue.”
As more people jumped in on the thread to taunt Mr. Morrison with facts and logic, an excited utterance of truth came from the most unlikely of sources. Mr. Morrison, responding to a comment about being brainwashed by Obama administration propaganda, wrote, “I don’t get brainwashed. I do the brainwashing.”
Not relying solely on Mr. Morrison’s rhetorical gifts of persuasion, however, SEIU doles out campaign cash to Republican and Democrat state legislators—more than $1.4 million in the 2012 election cycle alone—to “brainwash” Springfield and whitewash the conspiracy to defraud taxpayers that is Illinois state government in its current form.
Some Illinoisans, particularly those paying close attention, are so understandably inured to the thugocracy in which we live that Mr. Morrison’s statement will not shock them.
We should be shocked. All of us. Including rank-and-file members of SEIU.
We should be shocked to learn what Mr. Morrison implicitly thinks of the frontline state and municipal workers, janitors, security officers, and food service workers who pay dues for his representation.
We should be shocked to learn what Mr. Morrison, a political operative, implicitly thinks of the state legislators he finances (and they should be ashamed).
We should be shocked at Mr. Morrison’s arrogance towards Illinois families who play by the rules and forcibly finance Mr. Morrison’s racket.
In the wake of the revelations that the IRS was wrongly targeting conservative groups for unequal treatment under the law, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan observed, “People are all too willing to believe the Internal Revenue Service is hopelessly political in its judgments and actions. They are not shocked. They don’t think anything can be done, that the system cannot be corrected. They just grip the arms of the seat and wait for the weather to get worse. But cynicism aids and abets deterioration. You’ve got to stay shocked. It’s disrespectful not to.”
A lot of Illinoisans have been brainwashed by the Mr. Morrisons of this state to believe the same—that nothing can be done and that state government cannot be changed. This fatalism fuels the status quo.
A mind is terrible thing to waste on Jerry Morrison. So is a state.