With a nod to “The Twilight Zone”:

Imagine shopping at a marketplace where all the products are free.This is in a dimension beyond the day-to-day freedoms known to all Americans. It is one they tend to take for granted, yet it can be considered the root of all the others.

This marketplace not only offers a free product of all kinds of styles and viewpoints, but it also will market your goods, also at no charge. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity, because hypothetically, there is no limit to the freedom of the sincere expression of facts, reason and logic.

The fountainhead of this place is a perpetual free flow of information and ideas, the middle ground between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears, and the summit of his knowledge.

The door to this marketplace is easily opened with the key of imagination and instinct of expression. Beyond it is other dimensions – of sound, of sight and of mind. You are moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas.

In expressing yourself, you are traveling through these dimensions on a path toward learning and enlightenment. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. You’ve just crossed over into…

…the Letter to the Editor Zone.

Because letters form the foundation of the ideas marketplace, they are printed at this newspaper’s marketplace of ideas at no charge. The ones which disagree with this newspaper’s editorial position are printed along with all the others.

Some local residents recently received a mailing claiming this newspaper refused to print certain letters to the editor. That is a serious and blatant lie. Even those people, however, can submit a letter of less than 400 words with their name and phone number for verification, and we would print it.

We print all letters that comply with this nation’s libel law, which still remains relatively lenient. And we don’t charge money to print letters. At newspapers, freedom of speech and the press is free, and the marketplace is always open.

A Daily Mining Gazette editorial