(Editor’s be aware: This was printed within the Marion County Record after the Kansas newspaper acquired $3 million in one among a number of lawsuits prompted by police raids of its workplace and journalists’ houses in 2023. Co-owner Joan Meyer, Eric Meyer’s mom, died of a coronary heart assault the day after the raids.)
The New York Occasions is on Line 1. CNN is on Line 2. The Related Press is on Zoom. Tuesday, Nov. 11, was a type of days.
Media requests for interviews have been pouring in sooner than leaves have been falling from the large 200- or 300-year-old mulberry tree within the yard I grew up in and on a fateful day in August of 2023 inherited.
You may suppose all this media consideration a few bunch of cops rifling by newsroom drawers, seizing computer systems and cellphones, was a bit unwarranted. Possibly you suppose the $3 million that the county agreed to pay within the first and fewer important a part of lawsuits introduced due to the raid was some kind of windfall for these of us on the paper.
A minimum of one poster on delinquent media instructed as a lot after information of the settlement for a stipulated judgment was launched.
Fact is, the cash doesn’t matter. And in some methods, the First Modification doesn’t both. Sure, it’s essential that the press not be focused by weaponized legislation enforcement for private or political ends. However this swimsuit wasn’t about simply the media. It was a few society through which bullying by these in energy has turn into the norm.
This can be a little newspaper in slightly city. If we have been a child on the varsity playground, we’d be the diminutive one probably to be picked on for lunch cash. What’s essential is that the system, on this case, didn’t fail us. Though all kinds of highly effective individuals have been making an attempt their greatest to place us out of enterprise and to oust Vice Mayor Ruth Herbel, they didn’t succeed.
That’s an instance society as a complete must see. We don’t must cower in our houses, afraid to talk out or problem these in energy. That is America. Factual debate and free trade of various concepts are what we’re all about. It’s solely when individuals begin doubting their skill to affect debates and turn into afraid of talking up for concern of retribution that democracy begins to fail.
The primary symptom of a failing democracy is when individuals begin electing candidates whose insurance policies and techniques they don’t essentially agree with, however they vote for them anyway as a result of they know the candidates will stir issues up. That’s how just about each freely elected dictator initially got here to energy.
Don’t get me improper. I’m not essentially speaking about President Donald Trump. Lately, we’re beset in any respect ranges of presidency by myriad Donald Trumps — a few of them Democrats, a few of them Republicans, a few of them one thing else altogether — who push their energy to the boundaries and mainly dare anybody to problem them.
The cash we’ll be receiving not solely will likely be so much lower than the $3 million awarded. Authorized charges, taxes and a complete lot extra should be deducted from that. It nonetheless will likely be a big sum, however the primary significance will likely be symbolic — a reminder that typically the picked-upon battle again, sometimes they win, and on a regular basis all of us want to understand that it’s our obligation to not merely resign ourselves to abusive officers and conceal in our houses.
Tuesday, Nov. 11, was Veterans Day, on which we honor those that put their lives on the road on battlefields to guard our freedom. Lately, these battlefields lengthen to the house entrance. All of us have to be champions of freedom and democracy and never shelter at residence as if the menace to our approach of reside have been some new kind of COVID virus.
We didn’t win the lawsuit towards the county. Democracy did.
