I tire of the doomsday plots written in BIG CAPITAL LETTERS, warning us of the looming ultra-conservative theocracy movement just pining to put the country into an intellectual choke-hold.

Believe it or not, there are millions of thinking Christians in this nation who don't espouse theocracy, don't believe in the obliteration of the church-state divide (originally created to protect the Church from the State, mind you), and who don't believe in carrying around sandwich boards plastered with photos of aborted babies.

We believe in Jesus, and we believe that His teachings ought to influence our worldviews -- and, often, our votes. How, pray tell, is this any different in principle from those who espouse the writings of, I don't know, Noam Chomsky, unabashedly allowing his ideas to influence their worldviews and their votes? Both camps vote their values. But somehow, the former is blindly bigoted and the latter is enlightened and egalitarian. Please.

And by the way, some of us are sorry we voted for Bush and Cheney. However, respectable alternatives would have been nice.

Nancy,

This was a touching elegy to a paper I only viewed from a distance, living in the Upper Midwest.

I remember the first paper I worked for, first as a sports stringer in college, then as a GA reporter. It was a family owned paper where more than 100 years of combined experience sat down each morning on "editor's row," and that was before the retired editor walked in, bumping that number up to 150-plus.

That was before -- before the majority of shareholders elected to sell out to one corporation, before it was sold it to another stock-driven behemoth, which summarily sold the paper down the river. In my little town, the paper was the main thing that kept people in the know. Corporate ownership, and now our sudden national distaste for learning anything that we don't know already, have driven our little paper -- and now the Rocky -- off the cliff.

What are we doing? Why don't people value knowing anymore, or at least value it enough to pay for it? Seems as if what TV started, the Internet is finishing off with grim efficiency. God help us all.