Editor, The Beacon:

I must have missed Parts 1 and 2, but reading “The absence of reason Part 3” (Letters, Nov. 2-8), makes me glad I did. This massive waste of ink was nothing more than a rambling, fact-free, ad hominem attack on all of us 70 million-plus citizens who chose to vote for Donald Trump over Joe Biden (including a majority of Volusia County voters). We are branded “the crazies” who “never realize they are insane,” causing “violent … upheaval in America,” and suffering from an “absence of reason” since we’ve “gone mad through manipulation,” etc., ad nauseam.

Is this what modern political discourse has come to?

Gratuitous insults and mass condemnation are now substituted in our newspaper opinion columns for rational, fact-based debate on important public-policy issues. While I agree with the writer’s sentiment that “[m]an is probably more irrational than others in the animal kingdom,” there’s plenty of irrational conduct to be found on both sides of the aisle.

As a Republican, I can’t conceive of casting my ballot for another disastrous Biden term (rampant inflation, the open-border crisis, the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle, his war on our fossil-fuel energy base, feckless foreign policy, climate-change hysteria, green-energy corporate welfare and runaway federal spending with consequent interest rate spikes, to name just a few reasons). But I would never smear as irrational all Democrat Biden voters who I know to be predominantly decent, hardworking Americans who happen to have a different political point of view.

We need civil, reasoned debate in these trying times, instead of questioning the sanity of all those who disagree with us.

John Dichiara

DeLand

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