To the Editor:
Chinese communists are taking away our farm lands and infiltrating our government!
Libtards are advocating educating our children to become transgender socialists!
They are killing babies!
It seems that every time one opens the opinion page one is confronted with narratives that play on one’s emotions and calling out the latest boogeyman and… of course… it is ”the other”.
But is that the real issue that we should be dealing with, especially in government?
What are the issues that really have a real, lasting impact on our lives?
Would that be the cost of living? The opportunity for a good education for all of our children, not just those whose family can afford it?
Affordable housing? Social mobility for those that work hard for it?
Would a real issue be a representational democracy that we grew up believing that we had… that our forefathers fought a monarch to obtain? A government of “We the People”?
You see… emotional scare tactics only redirect attention away from the real issues. While all this rhetoric is being broadcasted over the airwaves, through social media, and… dare I say… local papers, we are losing our democracy. When the rhetoric vilifies “the other” in such a way that polarizes and there is no room for civil dialogue. We lose the opportunity to think critically and to listen to both sides of an issue. We lose the opportunity to make informed decisions. When one side demeans and takes away the rights of the other to the point that only one side counts, we slowly march towards authoritarianism. The state legislature, at the behest of Donald Trump, redrew district maps as a means of “tilting the playing field” with the intent of securing a positive result in the president’s favor. The gerrymandered map was drawn in such a way as to deny voter’s rights and representation.
This was done by the state legislators without the input of their constituents. As a result, citizens from all over the state collected signatures for a petition that required a democratic vote on the issue. They collected over 300,000 signatures, far exceeding the constitutional requirement. The Missouri Secretary of State has ruled that the petition will not be honored. Democracy has been denied.
Maybe there is a reason that our state legislators do not want citizen input as they draft laws affecting all of us. After all, look at what happened when they brought Amendments 4, which would have made it harder for citizens to amend the state constitution through an initiative petition process, and 5, which phase out state income tax which would have required increasing sales tax as a form of revenue for the state. Both bills were overwhelmingly defeated.
Maybe… the issue really isn’t the infiltration of Chinese communists that require us to carry guns to ward them off our farms… or those damn Libtards trying to indoctrinate our children.
Maybe… we need to vote out state representatives that really do not represent us or our real interests, the one’s that truly have an impact on our personal lives.
By Rob Overly
Linn
