To the Editor:
Post-election, all we hear from Donald Trump and supporters is the ‘big lie’, the election was stolen. Personally, I believe there is an accepted rule held by rational persons. For me, it is the ‘99.99%’ rule which dictates that the truth is held to be clear without any gray area, and it will be confirmation to any such issue(s).
An avid reader of Spout Off, and frequent contributor, I enjoy the ‘political’ offerings of both parties. I pay particular attention to federal government spouts, not state and local. So, I decided to look strictly for spouts about the ‘big lie’ and Biden stealing the election.
I chose to view the spouts of this past March and April, nine printed issues. I found these interesting results. I first counted all Republican supporting spouts, then did the same for the Democratic side. The results were: Republicans 253, Democrats 108, seems a rather unbalanced distribution (comments later). And the big finding was, there were zero spouts suggesting the election was stolen. Thus, we should realize that the ‘rule’ has again prevailed.
I believe the 253 is a reasonable sampling here in CMC. Therefore, we can conclude that the ‘big lie’ is false, at best ‘a tiny lie’. This can be held to be true throughout this country including insurrectionists and congressional Republicans.
But if the tiny lie, then two questions. Why is there a significant assembly of supporters, and what have been and will be the dangers to our democracy?
I am not a psychologist but isn’t there always that ‘element’ within who are drawn to the stimulus of ‘anger’. It merely takes the right, actually wrong, personality to take advantage of and cultivate those who will follow. Maybe they just need to be part of the negative group. Trump gave them what they craved by his self-professed enjoyment of friction and mayhem.
On the ‘unbalanced distribution’ (253-108) I can offer a conversation. Just months before the Nov. election a friend and reader of Spout Off made this statement to me, “if Trump is not re-elected this column will resemble the right arm of Fox News”.
At the time I stuck up for the Herald as I thought there would be the continuation of a balance for both parties’ expressions. Readers of Spout are welcome to their own thoughts. Regardless of such conclusions, this concept of public discourse should be part of every community paper, it is unique and special.
