Letter: The comment on the “electoral fiasco” must be corrected

Reading the Nov. 15 Agweek opinion piece by Myron Friesen, a line jumped that calls for a much needed correction. He wrote: "Here we are almost a year after an election fiasco. The fix must be indicated. There was no fiasco with the election, but rather the ongoing fiasco is the Big Lie created by Donald Trump and amplified by his minions and Republican members of Congress, too scared to stand up and tell the truth that Trump lost the elections.

A few brave Republican members of Congress dared to speak the truth, and they were reprimanded and punished for doing so. But the truth continues to emerge. Republican Secretaries of State where Trump has lost witness to the integrity of their state elections. The courts have resisted Trump's false claims, and Trump himself warned us months before his loss that, if he loses, he will claim fraud. Now, the details of Trump's plan to overthrow our government are being presented as evidence presented to the Congressional committee on January 6. Trump's Chief of Staff Mark Meadows presented the committee with a 38-page PowerPoint document detailing the strategies and actions Trump and his allies had planned to reject the election results and hand over the office of president to the unelected Trump .

Trump's illegal attempts to stay in power claimed lives in the brutal and bloody battle on Capitol Hill on January 6 and since. The financial costs for states to audit their elections that found no fraud amount to millions of dollars, all wasted on bending to the vain ego of a con artist.

There was indeed a fiasco and Trump pitted Americans against each other in the worst pandemic the world has seen in over 100 years. It was a fiasco orchestrated by a man whose desire for political power was more important than telling the truth about the severity of the COVID virus and the steps needed to stop its spread. It was the fiasco of a man who would gleefully destroy our nearly 250-year-old democracy to retain power. It was a fiasco of people blindly following "a story told by an idiot, full of noise and fury, meaning nothing," while refusing to listen to those who warned that Trump was a dangerous con artist and liar.

It's time to end the fiasco and for Americans to truly face the severity of the COVID virus which, allowed to spread rampantly, has killed nearly 800,000 Americans and damaged our economy. It's time to end the fiasco of allowing Trump's lies to gain air, dividing our nation and preventing us from facing the real challenges worthy of our time. It's time to end the fiasco by choosing leaders who show genuine concern for the good of others, and not those who brag about sexual assault, about their wealth, who belittles others with cruel comments, upsets people for sports or deliberately seeks to harm others by separating children from their parents in order to appear tough. It's time to choose leaders who seek the common good, not those who just want to line their pockets. It's time to choose leaders who appeal to our best natures, not our inferior natures of fear and hatred of those who are different from us.

The election was not a fiasco. The fiasco was the havoc wreaked in this great nation by one who deserved to lose and whose great lie can only end with our refusal to allow it to continue.

Editor's Note: Finley-Shea lives in Austin, Minnesota. The quote "a story told by an idiot, full of noise and fury, meaning nothing" is taken from Shakespeare's Macbeth.