We Need More People Like John Loudon

Remember when people had the metal to stand behind their words, to call a spade a spade, and to never back down from bullies?

That might be a false memory: the stand-up people have always been few and far between. If everyone had been John Wayne in the 40s, then John Wayne wouldn’t have been so interesting. John Wayne, William Wallace, Rosa Parks didn’t represent the norm of their day–they represented the ideal, seldom realized.

What’s changed in recent years is the ideal. Society now looks down on standing up. Compromising and folding under pressure, we’re told, are more mature than fighting for what’s right. John Wayne is ridiculed. William Wallace is forgotten. Rosa Parks was mistaken for a cleaning woman at a recent Democratic National Convention.

John Loudon, great friend of the Tea Party and former state senator, deserves our deep respect and thanks for refusing to back down to union thugs who don’t like hearing it like it is. In a recent speech, John joked that his wife (our own Gina Loudon) asked him when he’s going to take on someone who doesn’t blow up cars. The reference was to the casino crowd with its mob ties and to unions with their long history of skipping the conversation and getting right down to physical abuse and murder.

Since that speech last week, various union capos have demanded an apology from Loudon. John’s answer: “Nuts.” As chairman of Save Our Secret Ballots, John takes seriously his fiduciary responsibility to stop Barack Obama’s dream of ending the secret ballot in America. Unions hope to intimidate non-union workers into organizing unions by mandating open, public ballots.

For the record, I was about 6 hours away from being killed or injured by union bomb-throwers in about 1971. My dad took me to Gene’s Barber Shop on The Hill for my regular haircut. One Saturday, we went late in the afternoon, about 4:00. The next morning, my dad saw the story in the paper. After weeks of mounting threats against Gene’s to “unionize, or else,” the “or else” happened. Union thugs threw a Molotov Cocktail through the plate glass window of Gene’s an hour or so after the owner locked up.

Like John Loudon, Gene was a stand-up guy. He re-opened as soon as the smoke and fire damage was fixed. The first time my dad and I went back, my dad asked him if he was going union.

“Hell, no,” Gene said in his country accent. “They ain’t scarin’ off this country boy with a couple a sparklers.”  Years later, I took my son, Jack, to Gene’s for one of his first haircuts.  Gene outlasted the union thugs who’d bombed his business.

NOTE:  The St. Louis Beacon, to which the union bosses whined, has banned my IP address; otherwise, I’d have linked to the story.