Raid prologue

To the editor:

Recently, I spent a pleasant Sunday afternoon at Liberty Hall in downtown Lawrence viewing the documentary film “Seized” on their large screen.

The film chronicled the police raid on the Marion County Record, the home of Eric Meyer and his mother, Joan, and the home of Marion vice mayor Ruth Herbel.

The film was well structured and organized as it presented the story of the raid with actual footage of that shameful day in August of 2023 and the aftermath which gained the town national attention.

Should you have a chance to view it, then I believe it would be well worth your time. However, it didn’t address what had been happening in the town for many years before that day which led up to that violation of humanity, the lack of respect for human decency, and the willful incompetence it revealed.

Years before the raid, the City of Marion had been doing different types of actions without respect to ordinances and statutes. If city officials decided they wanted to do some particular thing, then the rules be damned and ignored. That’s referred to as the Machiavellian principle, which states the ends justify the means.

In the past, they sold on contract city property that didn’t have a title, gave a property owner and his bank a fabricated land usage document that was judged to be worthless, and refused to have required public hearings on zoning changes.

They have even given away city property to the public on occasion without a care or a second thought, among many other concerns.

After all this, is it any wonder that something like the raid would occur after looking at what had been happening unfettered for the previous two decades?

While running for office, the current mayor was quoted by the Record as saying about the paper, “If you read the editorials, every week is a lecture about how horrible we are.”

If the mayor doesn’t like the lecture by the editor, then stop doing and saying “horrible” things so the paper has nothing to report. Problem solved!

Roger Schwab
Topeka