Democracy depends on our participation. It depends on people running for office and it depends on people voting for our candidates. Our system of government, our way of life is endangered by our indifference.

The last election was a prime example of the trouble we are in. Look at how many offices were unopposed. Campaigns are important because it’s a time office seekers must meet their constituents and learn from them. What is most important to the people you represent? What do people want you to do? When there is no competition there is no need to discuss the problems and no need to look for solutions.

Why would anyone in this county run on anything but the Republican ticket? There is no hope of winning. Even though the county is pretty evenly split in thirds, with the number of Republican voters only slightly higher than the number of Democrats, the Republicans seem to wield control, and Democratic candidates for the most part have to self-sufficiently support their own campaigns. There is only the knowledge that our Democratic System depends on our participation that encourages them.

This was Susan Dillenburg-Bigler’s reason for running for town council. She wanted people to have a reason to go out and vote. Her opponents undercut that in a very discouraging way.

Terry Niebel, Colleen Yerico and Thomas Wik sent out a postcard with themselves on one side and the ballot on the other. Great, everyone was named exactly as they would be on the ballot except for Sue Bigler and Jeff Sayers. Where their names should be on the ballot there is only the word “opponent.” Their names are not included.

“So what is the big deal?” you might say. The big deal is without their names they may just as well be invisible. In this artifact of the election they don’t exist. This mailer purported to represent the actual ballot that voters would see when they went to vote. Nowhere on it did it indicate that these were just the local Republican candidates.

This was designed to discourage people from running and voters from realizing that they had a choice. By leaving Bigler and Sayers out of the conversation; Niebel, Yerico and Wik deliberately committed an act of depersonalization — the action of divesting someone or something of human characteristics or individuality.

Think of the impact of being erased as a person. Running for the sake of our constitutional rights seems Quixotic at best.

I love the free and open society we live in.

The candidates have a perfect legal right to send out the campaign literature they did. I have a perfect right to criticize them for it. I love living in a place where people can disagree and still respect each other, listen to each other and learn to work together.

We need to talk about what we are really up against economically and socially. The state of Kentucky used their tax dollars to lure ConAgra and Petri’s from Silver Creek. At the same time More than $200,000,000 of our taxes are going to an overseas company to open the Athenex plant in Dunkirk. As long as our tax money is being used against us we will continue to get poorer and poorer.

Marie Tomlinson is a Fredonia resident.