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Show Letter to the Editor one can point an accuiing finger and lay to the other, without any degree of guilt, you are black. We are all in thi together ink or wim, eurvive or perih. No one mane or group can aolve our community problems; became our community is not composed of one man or group. It is composed of every one of us. Therefore, our problems can only be solved, peacefully, peace-fully, by a togetherness of all. Someone has said, "We cannot take our freedom for granted; it must be won every day." 1 understand under-stand this to mean: We must be alert; we must be vigilant every day, if we are to have good government. govern-ment. The great besetting sin and weakness of this community is political inertia. Fellow citizens let's wake up. Some will say we have had two or three changes in the personnel of our Town Board since our trouble trou-ble began, and even though we had bad government in the beginning, surely it ha not continued with the passing of the years and the changes chang-es of personnel. The sad and lamentable la-mentable commentary to it all is: It has. The members of our Town Board, since 1954 have all been hand picked by the Progressive Party. West Jordan, Utah March 27, 1962 Dear Editor: I wish to compliment you and at the same time express my appreciation appreci-ation for you' having opened up the columns of your paper to expression ex-pression by citizens on public issues which are profoundly effecting our community welfare. I feel this is as it should be. The press in our broad land has always lieen considered a servant of the people and not a servant of the government; as it is where there are dictatorial powers. The press has been a power for pood in our nation in shaping and directing public opinion. Public opinion is something that should be watched very closely and never be allowed to get out of bounds. Scholars Scho-lars of political science say that an inflamed public opinion is the greatest great-est threat there is to a free society. This threat is compounded when it is pided and abetted by those who hold political office. ' I know the disconnection suit being be-ing litigated in the courts is now c-vse for considerable concern and feelinrs. But let us not become so enmeshed in or engrossed by our concern and feelings about the disconnection that we overlook and fail to give proper consideration to something far more important, namely: our basic and fundamental rights as citizens of the United States and also of West Jordan the rights that are guaranteed to us in our State and Federal Constitutions. Con-stitutions. After all, above and beyond be-yond everything else, we are governed gov-erned by law and not by the whim and fancy of men. 1 will try to set forth what 1 consider our basic community issue. It is basic to all our political trou' ble. It is not our disconnection suits as 1 have already indicated. Our political difficulties commenced commenc-ed in September of 1954; our sewer bond election was not until May 1957. There were no disconnection suits filed until after the sewer bond election. Regardless of what the ..-. ultimate result of the present dis connection suit is this basic political issue will still persist. So I say, in all sincerity and without with-out any reserve, hesitancy or malice ma-lice that bad government is our basic community problem. Solve this problem and most of the rest will vanish into thin air; fail to and our problems will persist, multiply and intensify. It is all up to us. We live in a free land. The choice is burs. The responsibility for what happens in our free society is likewise ours. No one can escape this fact. No Neither the manner of thinking nor the methods of the progressive party par-ty have changed from 1954 until the present. What was black then is still black. By 1963, when we will hold another an-other municipal election, the Progressive Pro-gressive party will have perpetuated perpetu-ated itself in office for. ten years. While this has been made possible by a vote of the majority, it does not follow as a corollary that the .results are good. To the contrary, I think the results have been extremely ex-tremely bad for our community. The tyranny of a majority in a democracy is just as bad as the tyranny of a dictator. Now to try and sum it all up and make myself clear: We have nothing noth-ing personal against the members who have constituted our Town Board since 1954; but we do against their methods. While we are not concerned about the type of bottle we take our medicine from, we surely are about it's content. We care not whether the bottle is short or tall, large or small. Again i say it is the content we are concerned about. Do you suppose it mattered to Socrates what manner of container he drank the hemlock from? To be continued in a later issue. Respectfully yours, Willis L. Jacobson |