Right now, there is a lot of attention focused on Watonga. Most of that attention puts us in a bad light. Maybe some is deserved.
But there is another type of attention that readers and citizens need to be aware of.
There are entities out there that spend their resources finding situations like ours so that the agendas those entities embrace can be advanced.
For instance, the antipolice, anti-government agenda. It would tell Americans all police are bad, corrupt, evil. Likewise, all government is hell bent on destroying freedom, even if that freedom is the same as lawlessness. This agenda advocates anarchy and has tried to hijack other movements to hide its real end game.
There is another agenda advancement cause out there that we here at the newspaper see perhaps more than some others. We do our best to weed the comments out because they target anything with the word Republican in it. Usually those ‘posts’ are from people in other states who are probably not really people, but invented profiles manned by AI engines trying to widen the already great divide in this nation. They don’t get to play on our page.
The nation is already divided enough without bad actors who might not even be American based trying to stir the pot enough that we are at each other’s throats.
We are interested in what is going on, what is being said. But we are only interested if it is a real person with legitimate interest in our community.
Maybe that is a narrow point of view. But I think there is enough work to be done here at home that we don’t need to become embroiled in the problems of other communities, and they sure don’t need to be telling us what to do in our town.
Some of those unprintable-deleted go so far as to call and curse businesses or post on unrelated social media pages or web pages about how awful this place is. My answer is that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
Yes, we have our problems. But let me tell you as someone who has lived in other towns and other states. No place is perfect. We have to work with what we’ve got to get to where we want to be. There may need to be some serious changes in government, but regressing to the old form of government is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.