Life as a newspaper editor is certainly always interesting.
Among the several letters to the editor I received on Monday, April 15, were two from out of state.
I have a series of boilerplate email replies I send out to letter writers reminding them that we need street addresses and phone numbers to verify authors are Sedona or Verde Valley residents or telling authors of very long letters that, “At xxxx words, this letter is in excess of our 300-word limit, per our guidelines, published on our website and on Page 4A. Please cut this letter to 300 words and resubmit it or we cannot publish it.”
I also have one I send to authors from outside Arizona or the Verde Valley informing them that we do not print letters from out of state unless they have some connection to our area, e.g., as owning a second home here, a business or property in our region or having some other social connection.
As a hyperlocal newspaper, our focus is on local issues, like traffic or Sedona City Council votes or local views on state and national issues. We have a few former residents who live elsewhere and still write us letters, such as our former recipe columnist Mary Ann Gove, who moved to the Phoenix area after her husband Martin died, and a longtime subscriber in Washington state.
Most authors with no connection to our region never reply. But, on Monday, I received nasty replies from two authors — one from New York state, the other from Illinois — claiming that the rejection of their out-of-state letters was based on personal politics and not basic geography. Had they ever read our newspaper, they would know our readership writes letters from across the spectrum.
Yet without any inquiry or conversation beyond the email that we don’t run out-of-state letters, one called me a “wise-[expletive]” “conservative-Republican,” while the other wrote I was “dirty anti-american comunist” [sic] spreading “pro-LGBT propaganda” who supports the “liberal pro-LGBT organizations like GLSEN and HRC.”
Apparently, I swung between two political extremes in less than an hour.
By the way, one of these fellows touted the fact he was a former college professor and the other claimed he was a debater who never lost an argument about his niche topic.
The suggestion that a person must be from a opposing political party simply because they don’t proffer full-throated support of one’s fringe political stance is a logical fallacy. Leaping from that to personal attacks is a moronic way to conduct discourse in civil society.
The close-minded partisanship both authors eerily espouse, despite being on the opposite sides of the political spectrum, merely highlights the level of pettiness our country has fallen to in the last few years.
Now, politically active Americans meeting others who do not support their political stance whole-heartedly demonize “the other” as “the enemy,” undeserving of further debate or compromise or an iota of effort to see their point of view, even if we disagree with them.
A long time ago, when we were still a young nation, we could put aside our differences and debate the issues of the day without name-calling and personal attacks. The substance of our debates mattered more than the perceived leanings of the speakers in this ancient age of days gone by — say, around 1997 or 2003 or 2009.
Decades of cable news punditry and battle lines drawn in ideological silos on social media means individuals don’t bother to see the argumentation that leads the “other” to believe what they believe. Liberals and conservatives harden themselves into partisan bunkers lobbing insults back and forth.
Some may point to the recent presidential elections for creating our hyperpartisan culture, but they are symptoms and post hoc ergo proper hoc fallacies.
The often repeated phrase “the vote was down party lines” heard in news stories about Congress and in state legislatures should give us all pause. Legislative votes are no longer about the issues, with each legislator voting on what is best for their individual constituencies, but merely reinforcing the cemented platforms of the two parties with passage or failure solely based on which side has more bodies in the room, not on what the bill may or may not do.
We must realize that we have vastly more in common than we don’t, that vigorous debate is a feature of our state and “compromise” is not a dirty word, but the highest value a republican democracy can achieve.
— Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
