That’s not the case

Within her letter “Enough Bashing,” Barbara Richardson wrote: “I have seen in the letters section ... that some people have written in and made comments about some of the people who write letters a lot and especially those who continually criticize other letter writers … It seems as though some of these writers have ongoing arguments a lot with each other and have to criticize or admonish or make their side known.”

That is a gross exaggeration. The Antelope Valley Press’ Letters From Readers section is anything but a social media-style free-for-all. It is and always has been a very well-moderated forum in which participants cannot attack one another aggressively.

Beyond that, and as evidenced by famous feuds between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin, and, say, Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, politics is a proverbial contact sport. The inter-workings of what passes for democracy in the US are unavoidably messy and perhaps necessarily so.

Per Ms. Richardson’s assertion that we frequent letter writers are seeking attention, she is mistaken. As we see by the fact that the Federalist Papers, for example, began as a series of letters-to-the-editor, such writings are firmly grounded (in) and link (to) basic principles of participatory democracy.

Speaking for myself, I wrote my first letter-to-the-editor to Lancaster’s now-defunct Ledger Gazette as a 19-year-old member of the California Republican Party. I did so because, ultimately, I took the aphorism “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” seriously.

And although my political views have evolved since I was 19, my only regret is that this forum does not host many more regular participants, complete with plenty more “back and forth, “bashing” (Richardson).

Guy Marsh

Lancaster