Much has been made of three major newspapers in our country — the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today — announcing they would not endorse candidates.

The Altamont Enterprise has never endorsed candidates. Why not? We don’t see ourselves as an elite force that can guide our readers to make the right choice.

Rather, we respect our readers as intelligent people who know their own minds. So we put our efforts into conducting in-depth interviews with candidates on issues important to our readers. Often, with town, village, and school board races, we are the only media providing this service.

Our policy certainly is not governed by fear of retribution. 

What I will share with our readers before this pivotal election are my own values, which influence not just how I will vote but how I edit this newspaper. The foundation for both is based on two tenets: the need to protect our environment and to serve our common humanity.

Our planet is at a tipping point with climate change. Although the current catastrophe was caused by human beings, it is affecting every species in the world.

We need government representatives at every level — town, county, state, and federal — to craft laws and programs that will stem the damage caused by greenhouse gasses.

As an industrialized nation, the United States is wreaking havoc not just on our own citizens but on residents of much poorer countries. Human hubris is obliterating the natural balance of the world, causing the extinction of species, some necessary to our survival.

Over the past four decades, our newspaper has delved into local environmental issues not covered elsewhere and our editorials have taken stances on what both individuals and local governments can and should do to preserve our environment.

The idea that curbing use of fossil fuel will cripple our economy is a false construct; renewable energy can be equally profitable — it merely shifts the prosperity from the current holders of wealth.

The costs borne by government programs now to get us to switch to renewable energy — everything from how we heat our homes to the cars we drive — will be repaid many fold by the savings from the cleanup of every worsening “natural” disasters.

The billions of dollars spent after the destruction caused by floods and hurricanes and fires will far exceed the cost to make the needed changes. And that is not even figuring in the incalculable costs to human life.

Serving our common humanity is of equal importance. Our democracy — this marvelous 250-year experiment in governance — depends on it.

This goes beyond tolerating differences between and among political parties. Each of us is a human being at our core regardless of the color of our skin, the place where we worship, our gender, our sexual orientation, our heritage, our ethnicity.

Our nation has evolved since its founding where only property-owning white men held sway. Beyond the civil war that ended slavery and gave Black people the right to vote and beyond the decades of commitment by suffragettes that ultimately gave women the right to vote, our laws and institutions have come to accept the rights of all to have a place in this democracy.

It is a work in progress and needs constant tending; the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

We’re proud of the citizens who every week have the courage to sign their names to letters they have written to us on issues important to them.

We try to provide a common ground on our opinion pages where individuals can share their views.

Our hope is that, in this increasingly polarized society, we can come to, if not embrace one another, at least understand one another.

Our stories over the years and particularly our “Other Voices” podcasts have attempted to give the marginalized people in our midst a voice.

These are my thoughts as the most pivotal election of my lifetime looms.