It’s time for more than just tilting at windmills
A regular reader asked a troubling yet reassuring question the other day.
“I’m curious,” she wrote. “Are you against wind farms? Several times I’ve heard people say that they were sure you were, and my cousin said this to me the other day. I said, ‘Really? Are you sure?’ I decided I’m going to ask.”
I’m glad she did.
As with many issues, this newspaper is neither for nor against wind farms. Religion teaches us that some things are absolutely good, and some are absolutely evil. But on our messy plane of existence, juxtaposed between heaven and hell, we flawed humans rarely behave 100% heavenly or 100% hellishly.
A key problem with society today is that too many people view too many issues in absolute terms — black and white instead of shades of gray. In our current climate of rampant bullying nationwide and locally, too many people insist on simplistic, good-vs.-evil views of everything from wind farms and immigration to gender identity, crime, reproduction, higher education, battlefield ethics, and dissent.
My personal opinion is that most recent criticisms of wind farms have been unjustified. Wind farm operators are doing their best to prevent tower lights from blinking incessantly. They have gone out of their way to clean up damaged blades as safely as possible after their removal. They seem to drive as much as possible on roads they are supposed to use.
Whether wind farms are economically viable absent government subsidies and whether procedures used to decide which property owners benefit from them and which are left just beyond project boundaries remain open questions. But whether payments some farmers have received could be the key to preserving family farms rather than allowing corporate takeovers seems to be a decided fact.
Whether turbines are majestic towers demonstrating our society’s commitment to exploring necessary alternative energy sources or eyesores that despoil beautiful vistas is in the eye of the beholder.
And the entire process of negotiating payments in lieu of taxes, while generating much needed revenue, seems at best a political loophole subject to potential abuse, just as how fuel taxes that are supposed to pay for roads end up being distributed to virtually every county department, regardless of whether they have anything to do with roads.
Still, it isn’t the job of journalists to decide any of these questions. It’s our job to report whatever few actual facts can be obtained and whatever much more abundant spin people on both sides place on those facts.
We can’t and won’t tell you what to think. We may offer things for you to think about. But whatever our personal opinions might be, it’s up to you, the reader, to decide.
Regardless of whether you end up agreeing with our personal opinion, we feel professionally fulfilled if you arrive at your conclusion based on systematic examination of facts rather than sloganeering and imagery that every side of any issue uses to try to get you to arrive at uninformed conclusions.
Unfortunately, it’s becoming harder and harder for journalists to play their vital role of information providers in our democracy. Social media and TV talking heads pervasively present little more than sloganeering, and too many people cocoon within these messages and never do what’s essential to democracy and expose themselves to facts that may challenge biases that each of us must admit we inherently possess.
Political forces seem intent on destroying the time-honored way healthy democracies evaluate conflicting opinions by trying to silence the few remaining news outlets that dare to provide platforms for information and opinions contrary to what bullying powers-that-be want to allow the rest of us to consider.
The raid two summers ago on our newsroom was one of the first shots in an ever-widening war against open dialogue in our democracy. We’re proud to brag that seizure failed to silence us, but we note that much larger organizations seem to have folded like origami under political pressure.
CBS, for example, paid what amounted to extortion to settle a baseless lawsuit so it could be bought by another company, then inserted a person with absolutely no experience as anything but an opinion writer in charge of all its reporting.
Rather than tell viewers that if they don’t like a late-night comedian they don’t have to watch him, ABC briefly banned him from the airwaves, and several corporate collections of stations continue to reject his program.
Universities, where all manner of differing ideas are supposed to be freely exchanged so students can find their own truths, now are threatened like victims of some shake-down with losing funding unless they present only certain ideas.
This isn’t democracy. It’s autocracy. As my dear mother said when seven law enforcement officers invaded her home for 2½ hours and contributed to her death the next day, these are the tactics not of patriots but of Nazis. We need Smoky Bear, who appeared at Lincolnville’s Oktoberfest, to alter his catchphrase: Only you can prevent a democratic holocaust.
So, I’m happy if readers aren’t sure whether this newspaper loves or hates wind farms. Maybe then readers will at least consider what the newspaper reports rather than dismiss it as yet more of the type of divisive drivel that drives social media.
— Eric Meyer