(An interview with the
author of 'The Letter')
by Glenn Beck and Janet Contreras
June 17, 2009 - 12:27 ET
GLENN: Yesterday, yesterday I read a letter from a woman
named Janet Contreras. Janet, is that
how you say your last name, Contreras?
JANET: Contreras.
GLENN: Contreras. When did you write
this letter?
JANET: The night before I emailed it to you. I was trying to reach Patrick Beck which I have been able to do
since then.
GLENN: Who's Patrick Beck?
JANET: He's the gentleman that you had on the show who's also from Arizona
that's organizing the march to Washington, D.C.
GLENN: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah. Well, I can put did you
ever get in touch with him?
JANET: I was able to, yes.
GLENN: Okay, good. It is an absolutely amazing letter and I read it yesterday on the
air and I'm going to open the show on television tonight [June 17] so all the
Fox viewers will see it as well tonight.
JANET: That's great.
GLENN: You were a Democrat?
JANET: I was, all my adult life. I was
a Democrat all my adult life, and during this last election Obama and Hillary
just made me so angry, I could not stay registered a Democrat. But John McCain made me angry, too. And now I don't know what I am other than
angry. I don't know what I am.
GLENN: Here's what you are. You are an
American. That's great. You know what, I find myself in exactly the
same position, Janet, that I'm angry because I actually care. And reading your letter, it sounds like you
do, too. And I thought that we all just
kind of had an understanding that we would vote for you and you would tell us
what you were going to do and, you know, there were going to be some problems
and we're not going to do some of the stuff, but you had the good of the
country at heart.
JANET: Exactly.
GLENN: And now you find out that the ones you voted for Democrats, I voted for
Republicans, we both find out they don't actually mean a damn word they say.
JANET: No. And it's extremely
frustrating because now I have to put my life on hold and do the job that we
hired them to do. If you had a store
and you hired a manager and you just walked away and let the manager mind the
store because you thought that you had trained the manager to run the store the
way you wanted it run and you come back to find out the manager has just let
everything go to pot and your store is just in shambles, whose fault is that? I mean, you walked away from the store. It makes me very angry. We hired them to do a job and they failed us
miserably.
GLENN: Yeah, but you know what …
JANET: At the same time we've stood by. We were not minding the store.
GLENN: God bless you for saying that, Janet. This is the thing that I think a lot of people because there are
so many groups of people and especially those in the media and in Washington
that still want to make this about politics.
JANET: Exactly.
GLENN: This is about betrayal quite honestly.
JANET: Uh huh.
GLENN: And we are the ones that betrayed our founders. We're the ones that betrayed
those who died on beaches.
JANET: Right.
GLENN: We're the ones who said we got so lazy.
JANET: Yes.
GLENN: They warned us. Our founders
warned us over and over and over again, when you become complacent, when the
government is no longer afraid of you, well, then you're in deep, deep trouble.
We saw it coming. All through the Nineties we said, oh, well,
you know what, character doesn't matter. When we said character doesn't matter, we gave them that's like
going to the store manager and us saying, one of the other store people saying,
"You know what, he's embezzling from you, I'm sure he's embezzling from
you" and saying, "I'm not sure if that's true. Look, he's a little slippery on a few things,
but I'm sure..." and the other guy's saying, looking at you, the manager,
looking at you while you say to the other, "Hey, back off him, okay? He's a little slippery on a few things."
As soon as you say that to somebody,
you give them permission to be slippery on all things.
JANET: Yeah, I agree.
GLENN: And that's what happened. That's
what happened.
JANET: Well, I don't want this. I don't
want this fight, Glenn. I don't have
the time or the energy or the financial resources for it, but that no longer
matters. It no longer matters that I'm
able or that I want this fight. I have
to take it on. It's not a matter of
choice anymore, which is why I wrote the letter.
GLENN: Janet, you have gosh, you just make my heart, you just make my heart so
full because this is what I - I don't remember the occasion - but I remember I
was on the air and somebody saying, you know, why are you talking about the
financial stuff? You're just talking
everybody down and you're talking the economy down and you're just trying to
scare everybody. And I remember
passionately with tears in my eyes saying, "I don't want to be this
person. I don't want to say these
things, but I have to." And to
hear you say that, I know exactly what you mean and I'm hearing it more and
more.
JANET: No, I would rather mow my lawn and wash my car and play with my
grandchildren.
GLENN: Who wouldn't.
JANET: But I can't now. I cannot every
minute of my spare time now has to be devoted to getting these guys out of
office.
GLENN: Janet, how long did it take you to write that letter?
JANET: Probably two hours. Because you
go back and you tweak and you …
GLENN: Have you ever written anything before?
JANET: Yeah, a few things. But I mean,
not published things but, yes.
GLENN: May I, may I make a prediction. Your
letter, in the next 72 hours, will be a letter that is circulated through a
good portion of this country on the Internet. I have a feeling your letter may become a rallying cry.
JANET: I hope so.
GLENN: I think it will.
JANET: Because when I tried to email it to our representatives and our
senators, most of my e mail was blocked, not in their district; they're not
interested. But you know what? I don't care if I'm in their district. I'm coming for them, too.
GLENN: Janet, I know for a fact that the White House watches my program. I know that the halls of congress, I've
talked to enough people in congress and the Senate that they watch, and those
who are on the receiving end of our investigations or our opinions, they watch
more than those who are not. Your
letter is going to be heard today in Washington and we're putting a petition
together with your letter in the free email newsletter today. So that goes to about a million people alone
there, and I'm going to ask them to please pass it on to all of their friends
and let's just watch what happens in the next, in the next week.
JANET: That would be great. The other
part of this is the invisible people who can and do represent my views need to
come out of the shadows.
GLENN: To stand up.
JANET: I don't know who they are. They're
going to get washed away with the rest of them if they don't have the courage
to stand up.
GLENN: Janet, I love you.
Click
here to go to part 1 of this story, the original letter from Janet Contreras.
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