Serving Proudly As The Voice Of Valley County Since 1913

Take Your Corners

We’re taking a break from the recent back-and-forthery on the subjects of gender and race this week. To be fair, Tess Fahlgren and the Courier’s Georgie Kulczyk and Lih-AnYang have had their say in response to Virgil Vaupel’s comments of Nov. 25 (“Reverse Equal Opportunity”) and VV has been oddly quiet. I was able to take the temperature of readers from Frazier to Saco (and north to Opheim) over the last week, and while the responses were less vitriolic than one might expect, the general consensus was something like amusement giving way to weariness at the personal nature of the discourse. The latter fact is troubling to an editor charged with keeping his readers interested. For my part, I like to see such discussions held in the light of day, in the pages of the newspaper, rather than timidly in pockets of likeminded thinkers. It’s my hope that as future discussions unfold, our contributors will be able to express their opinions independently of each other, allowing the readers to come to their own conclusions about the relative merits of arguments made by specific members of this community.

If that sounds like an admonition directed at VV for naming names and pointing fingers, or the aforementioned women for hitting back when directly challenged, it isn’t. Conversations get heated from time to time and we shouldn’t shrink from that fact, especially when it comes to issues so central to our collective wellbeing.

 

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