For better or worse, 2018 is another election season. Maine towns will soon be holding party caucuses and, in June, voters will select their party’s candidates for governor, the Legislature, and the U. S. House and Senate. Typically, these mid-term elections attract little attention and even less participation.
However, in November 2017 one in three voters turned out. “Experts” had predicted closer to 20 percent and Maine turnout in 2016 was the second highest in the nation.
In 1787, Benjamin Franklin told Mrs. Powell that the Constitutional Convention had given the people “A Republic, if you can keep it.”
What he meant by that was that America would thrive if the people made wise decisions and worked together for the good of the Republic. It’s important to note that he did not say “a democracy” as has been misquoted by some who see the people as an ignorant mob to be herded rather than as the informed and educated electorate Franklin envisioned.
Washington and Franklin both understood the danger that the republic would be lost if the people descended into a mobocracy of petty, mindless partisan bickering, and made their choices out of envy, greed and personal animosities.
I hope that, in 2018, Maine voters will again stun the so-called experts; not so much by turnout as by decisively rejecting the demagogues who seek to herd people into making choices based on party or economic and racial bigotry.
We can do that, but it will take individual effort and a lot of it. Making decisions for the good of the community, state, and nation requires analysis of facts and reliance on a framework of values and principles that goes beyond self-interest, short term gain, or retribution against “them.”
Unfortunately, while we have oceans of data available, reliable, objective, ethical sources of fact and truth are relatively difficult to find.
Much, maybe even most, of the national legacy media (radio, television, newspapers, and magazines) and especially the internet media have shed all pretense of objectivity or truthfulness and become the enthusiastic allies of those who trade in personal destruction, demagoguery and outright lies.
The corruption of principle has even advanced to “fact checkers” that are no more trustworthy than the media they pretend to police.
We are left to sort out what is true and material from and what is false or irrelevant, with little beyond our own principles and common sense to rely on.
Our task is difficult but not impossible if we do a little work and apply principles we learned in elementary school.
Another View is a weekly column written collaboratively by Dale Landrith of Camden, Ken Frederic of Bristol, Paul Ackerman of Martinsville and Jan Dolcater of Rockport.
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