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Good night and good luck

By Heidi Toth - Daily Herald - | Aug 29, 2013

If a liberal yells in Utah County and the responses are to tell her she’s wrong and call her a communist, did her speaking make a difference?

I’m wrestling with that question today, wondering if the last 18 months of writing things that would rile up the Daily Herald’s largely conservative readership — mostly to present a differing viewpoint, a tiny bit because as a middle child I love getting a rise out of people — actually made anyone think, or if I just served as a lightning rod for people who wanted to fight. The latter is what it felt like most days.

Fortunately, I have good news for all of the people who stopped subscribing to the Herald because of my dangerous and subversive ideas — this is the last one. You can resubscribe now. I really think you’re going to like Tuesdays.

Now, you may have learned nothing from me, except that liberal, feminist, all-natural hemp-gun toting, peace-loving socialists are in fact just as bad as you suspected from watching cable TV, but I have learned much in the last 18 months. I’d like to share some of it with you.

• I wasn’t a Democrat when I started this column. I was unaffiliated, because I think the two-party system is incredibly damaging to the democratic process. It’s nowhere near as bad as a one-party system, though. For Utah to function better, it badly needed organized opposition that would stand up to the Republican stronghold. I opted to be part of that opposition.

• Sometimes people equate “He comes from a good family” or “He’s active in church” with “You can trust him.”

• Hate mail makes good scrapbooks.

• People read what they want to read and believe what they want to believe.

• Sometimes I read comments and emails and thought the writers had good points that I’d missed or not considered fully. Sometimes I found my position shifting as I read them. Sometimes I rolled my eyes and thought the writer was as crazy as he or she thought I was.

• Those comments that made me think were rarely the comments that called me names.

• Being a good Mormon has nothing to do with politics.

• Whether people listened to me or not, people did talk, so I can leave feeling like I’ve accomplished something. I welcomed the discussion, but I would be lying if I said I’m not looking forward to checking my email without fear.

• It is not better for all the people who don’t like it here to just leave. Diversity makes society stronger. Your kids will be better off having friends from all sorts of backgrounds. Your churches will be stronger. Your neighborhoods will be better.

• Disagreement does not indicate delinquency. Differing ideas are only dangerous if you are so close-minded that you cannot accept the possibility that you could be wrong.

• I took no small amount of pride when people emailed me long screeds or went back and read all of my columns to find more reasons to be angry with me.

I’ll close with a shout-out and a piece of advice. To those of you who agreed with me, complimented me or even acknowledged that I wasn’t a big doofus, thank you for helping me feel less alone and like there was a reason to keep writing. To those of you who saw red when you read my column, when such a problem arises in the future — just turn the page.

Toth out.

Heidi Toth, who has written the popular* Left in Utah column since February 2012, is leaving the Daily Herald on Friday. You can follow her on Twitter @leftinutah to find out what exciting communist things she has coming up.

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