Dear Editor,
Lately I’ve heard complaints of “nobody told me” regarding county business. I’ve also heard similar complaints from many of the same people that they don’t trust their elected officials.
Here’s a question. Why would any sane person rely on someone they don’t trust to provide them with information?
Thomas Jefferson wrote in a 1789 letter to Richard Price that “wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government.”
This was a novel idea in 1789.
Note that Jefferson used the phrase “wherever the people are well informed,” not “wherever the people are informed by their government.” He recognized the fact that it is the responsibility of the citizen to know the government’s business. He also, along with the other Founders, had a healthy distrust of all government.
Until the founding of the United States the practice of a people ruling themselves was rarely encountered. The idea that the people were capable of and had the right to govern themselves was the Novus ordo seclorum (A new order for the ages) on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States.
The 18th Century saw another new and exciting change, the widespread availability of printing presses. During the American Revolution the Colonials depended on their own publishers and printers, not those of the English government, for information. Paul Revere’s engraving of the Boston Massacre reached every corner of the revolt as did the essays of Benjamin Franklin and copies of the Declaration of Independence. By 1790 there were more than 250 newspapers in the thirteen states. Copies of the proposed Constitution were readily available, as were a wide variety of books, pamphlets, broadsheets, and posters.
Information once available to only a few was readily available to anyone who could, and would, read.
Today, we are flooded with information. We have websites, social media, TV, radio, word of mouth, and the old stand-by, the newspaper.
“But nobody reads the newspaper.”
Maybe you should. In Mississippi governmental agencies are required by law to post legal notices in newspapers. Not the internet. Not on billboards.
Not on the TV or by individual mailings.
In the newspaper.
Want to know what your supervisors, school board, planning commission, water district, aldermen or legislature is doing? Want to know whose property is up for a tax sale?
Those legal notices are required by law to be posted in the newspaper. Better yet, many newspapers even print the stuff that government doesn’t require itself to post. News people especially like to publish the stuff that might make government folks uncomfortable.
The law doesn’t require that anyone has to read the paper for you, or to deliver that newspaper to your doorstep, but the law does require that those notices be made available for you to read. Most Mississippi papers today are available both on paper and online. Many of them are available online for free. The Mississippi Press Association has a free legal notices website https://www.mspublicnotices.org/
You and I are responsible for informing ourselves. It takes a little effort and a little time, but it’s not difficult to be informed.
Read the legal notices. Attend meetings. Ask questions of your elected officials and listen to their answers. Ask hard questions but be polite. Understand that there’s a chance that they might be right and your cousin’s neighbor’s ex-wife’s brother who saw it on the internet might just be confused. Understand that there’s probably a lot more to the story than what was in the Facebook post you saw or in the monologue by the radio guy you heard at 3am.
And take everything you learn, from every source, with a bucket full of grains of salt.
Jefferson entrusted the governing of this country to an informed electorate. He and the other Founders made the effort to inform themselves. We have to follow their example and stay informed.
The Washington Post masthead includes the words “Democracy Dies In Darkness.” Those may well be the truest words in that publication. Democracy does die in darkness. It’s up to each of us, not the government you say you don’t trust, to turn on the light for ourselves.
-Ricky Stevens
Tate County
