Musing - on the editor's mind

Last week I finally got my Washington driver’s license and license plates. Then I went to the Mount Vernon library to work. Here is a slice of my life:

The clerk at the Department of Licensing asked if I wanted to register to vote. Bless her. Yes, I did, and did. No forms or anything. It was part of the state, automatic. Sometimes citizenship needs to be that easy.

The Department of Licensing is an agency of state government. Great. In Ohio, licensing bureaus are contract companies the state hires. The owners get a piece of every transaction. The employees work for them. There is a whiff of patronage, a basic bureaucratic and definitely state function out-sourced to private hands.

I went to the county auditor’s office to get my license plates. In the hallway was a sign with the country’s mission statement, articulating a code of conduct for county personnel.

The county commissioners refer to me as a customer. That rubs me the wrong way. It reduces my citizenship to a transaction. It changes the role of staff. To Kafka they were faceless bureaucrats. I get that registering my car is mundane.

Clerk does not have to be a patronizing term. With the right attitude and training, service, even paper shuffling functions, is honorable, if not noble. Someone has to do it. Citizens – those of us in line – can tamp down complaining and appreciate that all jobs are not rocket science.

At the Mount Vernon library, I walked into the reading room and was greeted by posters of Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom of Speech,” 1943, and George Caleb Bingham’s “The County Election,” 1852. Those librarians.

The only ideology to those posters, and to libraries, is openness, accessibility and the freedom to think and to inquire. We might not like what the fellow says when he speaks or how the voters vote, but we want our neighbors to speak and to vote.

A newspaper – journalism – is perhaps the one business in our society where a vocal opinion is encouraged. Think about it: in many fields of work we are told to leave it: opinions, politics and religion at the door, and not rock the boat or get into disputes.

Publishers seek out opinion. Readers, fellow citizens, please write letters and guest columns. All you have to do is type and send. But you cannot lie or be malicious.