When this paper asked the new president of the Wexamour Archaeological Society to write a few words introducing herself, the request came with one gentle condition, “keep it apolitical”. I have decided that I find it absurd, and I am going to tell you why.

A Chronicle is a strange place to ask for silence

A newspaper is the one lamp a town keeps lit against the dark. A press that agrees to look politely away on request is not a press at all, only a pleasant noise, and a town that lets its Chronicle be told what it may not print has already lost more than it yet knows.

Besides, I am the president of a society of people who dig for their living. I will not be handed the office one week and then look away the next.

What we are condemning

The Wexamour Archaeological Society condemns Operation MantiMouser. You already know what it is, thanks to a braver reporter than this office would have preferred: animals bred to hunt serpents and bound for the very roads where serpent-folk walk home after dark. We condemn it because we do not know enough and we will withdraw our condemnation the day we are satisfied that the serpent-folk farmers of the strip are safe, and not one day before.

What the Society intends to do about it

Members of the Wexamour Archaeological Society, I call upon you and all the citizens of Wexamour to stand outside the doors of every Office of Resource and Civil Management. We will stand there until all our questions are answered and we are assured that our friends and neighbors are safe. To be counted among us you need no dues and no diploma. You need only to want the truth badly enough to stand in the warm sun and demand it.

To the men and women inside ORCM

I have known a great many of you for years. You have worked with my husband and let me stamp your children’s library cards. You are clerks and wardens and keepers of the record, and you are not the wall. You are the good people the wall was built to protect.

I am asking you to lay down your work and strike. Come out from behind those doors and stand on the step beside us. Nothing in that building runs for a single hour without your hands. Stand with us and watch how quickly a thing that was too delicate to describe becomes a thing that can be described after all.

I stand with Luna

While I have this platform, I must call out one more thing before I set down the pen. It was pure censorship to take Luna’s column down. Her only offense was to call out a reporter who wanted to kick good folk while they were already down. The serpent-folk are citizens of Wexamour exactly as you and I are, and they deserve to be treated, defended, and cared for as such. The Chronicle should remember that when deciding what and what not to publish.

In closing

I told our members, on the day they were good enough to elect me, that I would gladly challenge anyone who would rather let things stay buried. I did not expect to be tested quite so soon, but here we are. The truth is apolitical, and if folks think it isn’t, then they are absurd, not me.

Edna Thatch

President, Wexamour Archaeological Society