Raves, Rants & Roses

RESPONSE: I am a 78-year-old independent voter, Marine Korean War veteran ’51, Baylor graduate ’54, now retired. Over the years I have voted 50 percent Republican, 50 percent Democratic and have been disappointed by both, but hope springs eternal.

Neither party has enough majority to win elections outright, so the final decision is usually decided by so-called “swing” voting independents.

Recent letters to Tyler Paper Aug. 24 reflect an alarming trend from the lunatic fringe espousing shouts of “the sky is falling, the sky is falling” as in a children’s storybook character “Chicken Little.”

Shades of 1930, when a fictional radio broadcast by Orson Welles had some listeners on the verge of suicide because they believed Martians had landed in New Jersey.

Maybe it has something to do with being in the midst of the greatest recession since the Great Depression that has pushed so many gullible and marginally stable souls near the brink. If so, they need only to heed President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s admonition at the height of the Great Depression who advised, in a fireside chat, “all we have to fear, is fear itself.”

Marvin Lester Myers
Holly Lake Ranch