The silent majority in the Lancaster School District bond election

The phrase of President Nixon’s was running in the back of my head as I finished writing my editorial for the Oct. 19 issue of my newspaper, Lancaster Today.

Certainly, there’s a great chunk of actual or would-be voters out there who read my newspaper who are silent. They’re certainly silent. They’re not either blindly accepting everything that Superintendent Larry Lewis says about the current bond proposal, including his claim that he will have to house students in their houses if they don’t approve the bond, nor are they believing that everything Lewis proposes is evil, wrong, unethical, has some financial inside (maybe that’s why Lewis, at the Oct. 12 Lancaster Chamber of Commerce lunch, stressed he had no personal gain from the bond issue — somebody was spreading rumors) or was suspect on nativist grounds it involves RBC Dain Rauscher, with its nefarious Canadian financing, or involved an architectural firm that doesn’t have an office in Lancaster. (So, does a leading conspiracy theorist want every school district in the state of Texas to have an architectural firm inside the district? If so, how does he propose to do this? By government regulation? And, yes, Jeff Melcher, you said one thing wrong with Corgan was it didn’t have anybody in Lancaster. If we apply your logic to the whole state — this is called analysis — that’s the logical end result, i.e., the state of Texas forcing some architectural firm or another to have an office in every school district in the state. I’m sure you, with a large-government, activist political philosophy, would willingly support that.)

(Second parenthetical sidebar: I have a friend who has a friend who works for another architectural firm that’s in school design. She mentioned nothing conspiratorial about Corgan, either, even though it could benefit her company if something were found. And, Jeff Melcher, you haven’t seen the vaunted Herb Booth or anybody else at The Dallas Morning News uncover any problems either, have you?)

Anyway, I believe the silent people who haven’t written letters to the editor from either camp represent the majority of Lancaster voters. And, Mayor Joe Tillotson estimated that three-quarters of our readers vote in local elections.

If the school bond fails, after Nov. 7, I will actually be taking the proactive step of writing an editorial for a series of bond propositions that I believe this silent majority can accept. Probably neither of the two camps mentioned above will like it, which will mean it’s a good thing.