Dear Editor:

The double standard is alive and well in Grant County, as usual. Some of the people who expect and demand their rights and privileges show no respect for the rights and privileges of others. They work overtime to keep their neighbors from having choices and their own freedoms.

The issue is simple. A friend brought a sign to put on my fence. A few days later it has been spray-painted. Do we get even and foul everyone else's signs? Of course not. No law-abiding American would. People have opinions and a right to vote as they choose, local miscreants excepted. Stepping on my private property to damage a sign isn't exactly a vote for freedom.

Perhaps negative, punitive disagreeable people would rather see dictatorships here'as long as it was their choice of dictators. What this really says is that Thomas Jefferson's faith in the common man has been betrayed. He said that poor, downtrodden, hopeless people could be elevated if they were educated and allowed to improve their lot; America was the place to do it.

Seems he didn't know how hopeless and irascible some of our local citizens are, how miserably they have failed to improve their characters and conditions; how bitterly they fight against the very freedoms and opportunities they claim to want so much; how unfit some are to live in a free society.

I G