BE OUR GUEST

Mike Turner is a resident of Patton and proponent of a public vote on the proposed bi-county lake project.

Every citizen of this great country has been guaranteed certain rights, among those being freedom of speech by way of one vote for each citizen. That is, those rights were guaranteed until now!

Elwood Mouser and the other commissioners of Bollinger County have taken that right away from the people! They have decided the people of Bollinger County are not intelligent enough to speak for themselves, so they are going to do it for them.

The people cannot speak if they cannot vote! The commissioners and 553 have decided for 7,600 people who reside in Bollinger County that they will not be allowed to vote on issues affecting their lives or their well-being. The county commissioners have suppressed the people's freedom of speech by telling them they no longer have the power of the vote.

The commissioners have conducted a straw vote in the Banner Press, which they and the Banner Press have controlled. Negative statements about the proposed lake were headlined on the front page. The rest of us Bollinger citizens were relegated to the back pages with our positive statements. This is hardly equal access to free press.

The latest issue of the Banner Press has come out with statements from the commissioners that are completely in error and downright stupid. They brag of how much money they are saving the people by not allowing them to vote in a legal ballot. In fact, they save them nothing. It doesn't cost extra to put an item on the ballot when there are already items on the ballot to be voted on anyway.

The Bollinger County Commissioners not only control the people's right to telling the people of Cape Girardeau County what is best for them. They claim they have saved the citizens of both counties $18.77 per person. Such statements are absurd. They are based on a hypothetical cost which does not exist. They make references to a vote on a swimming pool that failed in a special election to justify their action of suppressing people's right to vote. A swimming pool is sure as hell not a lake. Such a comparison is ludicrous.

When our troops went to Desert Storm, they were fighting for the very freedoms which our Bollinger County commissioners are now taking from us.

I can't speak for other people, but when our leaders start taking our constitutional rights such as freedom of speech through my right to vote, I get very upset and I would think a lot of other citizens would too.

What's next, I must ask? What other rights are we about to lose?

The only way to settle an issue is to let the people speak! Let them speak by giving them back the right to vote as was intended by our forefathers when they wrote the Constitution.

I would hate to see the Lake Committee disbanded. This would spell victory for the Bollinger County commissioners. Not a victory for opposition to the lake, but a victory for those who oppose freedom of speech and for those who have decided they know what is best for us.