Letter to the Editor: Nov. 20, 2024

What was wrong with the Nov. 5, 2024 election

Since Nov. 5, many urged, in one way or another, that we come together and unify. Would that we could. The last campaign was the most brutal at least since I voted in my first presidential election 1956. Healing may be difficult. But we have to begin.

In my honest opinion, we have been victims of our own thirst to know. Pollsters and other political operatives have been driven to provide a seemingly endless supply of superfluous information. There were so many sub-groups of voters, some never before named as such. This led the political folks to attempt to provide some considerations of the wants of each subgroup. It was impossible to provide satisfaction to all the groups since they overlapped and presented opposing wants. Paraphrasing a former president, one might say you can satisfy some of the people all of the time, and you can satisfy all of the people some of the time but you cannot satisfy all of the people all of the time.

I have a little red book on my desktop that I consult often. It is the Constitution of the United States. The opening words of the Preamble are instructive at this time: “We the People ...” It bears repeating again and again, that the people built the Constitution and hired a government to administer the Constitution – not the other way around.

But, to the point at hand, we speak of ourselves as People, no sub-groups, not even the Biblical groups of “man and woman He created them.” The more we attempt to refine ourselves into this group and that, the more we divide ourselves.

There was a time when candidates gave us a reasonable approximation of what they planned to do and it was up to us, the voters, to decide one of two grand plans. Candidates did not seek to play to every sub-group in the populace. By defining a plethora of sub-groups, politicos have put us at war with each other as we demanded attention to our wants. This must stop!

We are in only one group: we are Americans. We are citizens by birth or naturalization. That means the politicos have but one sub-group: the citizens of the USA.

 Speak to us as Americans or shuteth up!

Bernie Lyngdal

Tomahawk