Letter to the editor: Making up nonsense further divides us

It’s hard to know where to begin to refute such nonsense as the letter “When everything is free, we’re not free” (Feb. 1, TribLIVE). The Dems will tell us where to work and live? How much we earn? I sure hadn’t heard that. No constitutional rights? It’s the Republicans who are trying to take away our right to vote. People who make stuff up and present it as fact, with the help of social and other media, are the reason this country is so divided.

Health care for all, frequently mischaracterized as socialism, is available in every other civilized country in the world. During this pandemic it should be obvious that it is in everyone’s interest to keep everyone healthy. Disease passes from poor to rich.

“Loony lies … are cancer for the Republican Party,” as Sen. Mitch McConnell has said, and are a danger to the security of our country. President Trump told almost 30,000 documented lies, and gullible people believed, spread and enhanced them.

We just escaped a four-year horror movie, during which over 100 environmental laws were overturned (Google it), taxes cut for himself and his rich buddies just before a national emergency when we really needed the money, and hundreds of thousands of people died from the pandemic he ignored and even exacerbated with his mockery of masks, etc. Then came Trump’s final lie, that he had won the election, and we barely avoided a dictatorship.

Please, people, think before you speak. There are 74 million people in this country who will believe almost anything.

Al Duerig

Salem