The Lancaster School District bond election — unfortunately, there’s no “third side” in the vote

In the editorial I wrote about the Nov. 7 bond election this week (link coming on Thursday), I quoted the Sufi philosopher Idries Shah, saying “There are never just two sides to anything.”

Unfortunately, whether during early voting or on Election Day, for Lancaster voters, there will be just two sides on this issue; there is no “neutral, but let’s reason out something better” on the ballot. In the editorial, I deplore both the apocalyptic comments of Superintendent Larry Lewis, on the one hand, threatening to put children into residents’ living rooms, and the conspiracy thinking of people like Jeff Melcher on the other, insinuating that a Canadian bank potentially stood posed to take over the Lancaster School District should this bond be voted in.

The third side would be the assembly of a citizens council including NO representatives from either the school district or the long-known Committee Against Virtually Everything, or C.A.V.E. people. Sorry, not my invention; I know my predecessor as Lancaster Today editor, Chuck Bloom, whose tenure as either staff writer or editor stretches back to before the 1994 tornado, used it repeatedly, though I don’t believe he’s the one who invented it, either.

Unfortunately, that isn’t likely to happen. Given the latest ramp-up on the conspiratorial side, including what I see as financial insinuations against yours truly in his last paragraph, I doubt Melcher will support ANY bond issue, at least as long as Lewis is here.