Thank you, Fountain Hills Times!

In my activities and travels around Fountain Hills, I regularly bear witness to the good works of my fellow citizens. These may present as courteous driving, civility in personal exchanges, volunteerism or donations of money-goods-services.

All these occur without expectation of recognition or reward. This community-minded selflessness uplifts my spirit.

It reinforces my personal belief, the germ of which lies in my upbringing, that individual positive acts in aggregate can make our world a better place. Personal initiative and responsibility trump rancor and selfishness any day.

Comes a Wednesday, and I see in the paper letters expressing unsolicited kudos, or heartfelt gratitude. I see letters of opinion expressed with civility, perhaps peppered with accurate historical fact and perspective. My spirit is further buoyed.

Suddenly, I stumble into a fetid miasma of putrescent verbiage, the kind routinely contributed by the salt of the earth (when such salt is of the kind rubbed in wounds to exacerbate pain and inhibit healing).

Letters from the self-important, science-denying, authority-hating, conspiracy-seeing, misattributing, don’t-trouble-me-with-actual-facts types.

Such folks seem to subsist on an intellectual fare limited to raw Fox and half-baked Limbaugh. Their bilious, nonsensical spewings are all the more pitiful because they appear to believe they have a message of some value, despite the lack of any positive, realistic suggestions.

Yes, thank you, Fountain Hills Times, for restoring in me the awareness that there is much work yet to be done in this world. Free speech, good. Responsible and constructive speech? Better.