Agree, disagree, or maybe both
Love him or loathe him, Donald Trump has accomplished at least one thing in his first few days back in office. He’s swelled the number of letters to the editor we receive each week.
We won’t let this become a lasting legacy of Trump II, however. Many people have many things to say, good and bad. We’re just not sure anyone — supportive or opposed — is listening to points others might make.
More important, this is a local newspaper. We have plenty of local issues to concern ourselves with and applaud those writers — distant and local — who take time to stake out a stance and suggest that others come around to their point of view.
This week’s column contains excellent advice from an Ohio reader who suggests not only improving our informational infrastructure but also making it a community goal to lure information technology to the county.
Such a strategy would require concerted efforts to do such things as offer discounts on electric rates and increase information technology coursework in area schools.
Instead of viewing payments in lieu of taxes from wind farms as windfalls to finance ever-more elaborate buildings and services, perhaps they could be invested in a fund that — appropriately enough — would subsidize electric rates for a company wishing to locate a data center here or help pay for added technology needed to broaden educational offerings.
We’d all have to get past knee-jerk skepticism, of course. The county already is on record as opposing data centers devoted to crypto currency. If fear of the unknown and the hearing of reactionary anecdotes from elsewhere make us leery of anything computer-related, we’ll be consigned to pinning our hopes on an ever-shrinking manufacturing market.
Issues often are clouded by people grasping onto a small aspect of a proposition and overreacting to it. Our letters column this week also contains a perfect example of that — and of how news organizations get blamed for anything and everything.
A resident made a pitch a week ago to county commissioners about why showers ostensibly set up for campers were being used by non-campers.
Agree or disagree, it’s a valid point. Taxpayers footed the bill for the showers not to create a public bathhouse but to support camping. The problem is, the argument came to focus on whether people using the showers were homeless.
Well-meaning people see nothing wrong — and plenty right — with providing services to people who need them the most. Others, equally well-meaning, fear how crime might ensue. Both have valid points, though not in all cases.
Years ago, Milwaukee’s Marquette University had a problem. After Milwaukee’s most infamous citizen, Jeffrey Dahmer, went on his killing spree, the New York Times produced a map showing where Dahmer lived and worked and where he found his victims.
The map included Marquette’s campus, smack in the middle of Dahmer’s terrible triangle. Not included were several other relevant locations — police headquarters, for example, which was equally in the center of Dahmer’s killing grounds — but the result was devastating: a 10% decline in Marquette’s enrollment from the New York area.
The university considered building walls around campus, as Harvard and MIT did in the Boston area. It thought about bolstering locks on its buildings, adding surveillance, creating green spaces — a whole range of options.
In the end, it opted not to lock classroom buildings but rather to leave them open and even invite the homeless to take shelter in their hallways. The result was surprising. Crime on campus actually declined. Having people, even the homeless, occupying corridors all night deterred potential burglars and vandals.
Such results might not be possible everywhere. The homeless population in Milwaukee was large enough to serve as a meaningful deterrent. That might not be the case at, say, Marion County Lake. Still, it shows that conventional wisdom sometimes can be wrong, and that no idea should ever be automatically condemned.
When such condemnation happens, news media almost immediately are blamed. If public reaction is negative, people often assume the problem was with how an idea was reported not with the way the idea was presented.
We at the paper were very concerned this week when we received a letter accusing us of grossly misrepresenting a news story. We went back — as you’re welcome to do — and checked a recording. We found that our coverage came nowhere near distorting the speaker’s intent. Only one very minor point could be quibbled with.
Still, venom spewed on Facebook about the speaker’s idea spilled over onto us, with the speaker essentially blaming us for how those on anti-social media had rejected her idea out of hand.
Grabbing onto a small aspect of an issue — homelessness vs. whether showers were built for campers — is a knee-jerk reaction. So, too, is blaming news media. Not only do reporters become the target of name-calling. Plans worthy of pondering are pilloried, and elected officials are excoriated even before we’ve had a chance to see what they’ll really do.
Democracy depends on civil debate that accepts the notion that others’ concerns may be valid and tries to address them, politely and productively, rather than with bombastic and increasingly shrill rejoinders that seek to dismiss what they say.
We as a community don’t become stronger together by marching in lockstep and automatically praising or condemning anything and everything. Consideration and compromise are not signs of weakness. They are the clearest possible signs of strength.
— ERIC MEYER