To find answers, we need to ask questions
In a world often focused on answers, it may be more important to ask questions.
Should Remington Rd. from US-56 to potential saint Emil Kapaun’s church be a state highway, fostering tourism and safety while at least modestly reducing pressure on county road funds?
Should a big portion of state fuel taxes, designed to pay for maintaining roads, be sent directly to local governments charged with doing most of that work?
Should ambulance attendants be allowed to work schedules that let them simultaneously hold down multiple full-time jobs demanding fresh minds and bodies when professionals like pilots and truck drivers cannot?
Should robust background checks be required for every sensitive government hire, and should previous government employers be required to truthfully and fully report why an employee may have been encouraged to leave?
Should wind farms and pipelines receive tax abatements allowing them to so depreciate their worth that the taxes and payments they ultimately make are a tiny fraction of what they really owe?
Should those who install landscape-altering items like oil wells, cell towers, feed lots, solar farms, and wind turbines be required to set aside sufficient, untouchable money to ensure removal of these items once they have reached the end of their life?
Should governmental bodies be required to record their closed-door sessions so that, if their secrecy is challenged, a judge can determine whether the meetings were legal?
Should cities be allowed to make a mockery of rules requiring independent publication of their actions by pretending that their costly, often neglected government websites are newspapers?
Should officials and lawyers who flout laws like those governing open records be personally responsible, or must taxpayers bear the burden for their mistakes?
Should schools spend a small fortune and deprive students of hours of instruction to bus them to distant sporting events when closer competition, from almost the same size schools, is available?
Should colleges supported by taxpayers become professional sports franchises, doling out millions to what once were amateur student-athletes?
Should government workers get far more holidays and far more generous pensions than typical private employers can afford to provide?
Should vacancies in elected offices be filled by tiny groups of party cronies meeting in back rooms, or should the public be allowed to vote at the next available election of any sort, like this August’s local primaries?
Should police be required to tell the whole truth, not just the part that makes something look incriminating, when seeking authority for arrests or searches, and should prosecutors and judges be required to actually read and evaluate these requests before granting them?
We could fill this page with questions. Each of us is likely to have a somewhat different answer to each of them. What’s important is that they need to be asked.
Where that’s supposed to happen is in our state legislature. Unfortunately, most of the people who represent us there seem more concerned with whether transgender abortion doctors are illegally crossing the border to stuff ballot boxes and take away guns.
The real question is, do we still care for the freedom and democracy that generations of Americans fought and died to guarantee, or are we ready to fritter it away by not getting involved?
Nearly half of Marion County’s voice in selecting our next state representative is silent because no one chose to become a precinct committeeman or committeewoman. The legislator we’ll be replacing — the same person who tried to remove evolution from school curricula — ran unopposed in 2024.
If America descends, as many pundits predict, from democracy into authoritarian or bureaucratic rule, the question we will have to ask ourselves is why we blame others for this when we were unwilling to get involved.
— ERIC MEYER