DEAR CITIZENS OF CAMPBELL COUNTY, WYOMING:

CONGRATULATIONS.

DEAR CITIZENS OF CAMPBELL COUNTY, WYOMING

Congratulations. You have just purchased, for the tidy sum of $700,000, an education in civics few universities can match. That’s roughly fifteen bucks per person — a gas-station lunch combo for every man, woman, and coal dust–splattered child in Gillette. For that price you could have bought new books, Wi-Fi for the county library, a teacher’s raise, or a small statue of common sense. Instead you decided to buy a lawsuit.

You live on top of the Powder River Basin, the place that keeps toasters glowing from Texas to the Great Lakes. Black Thunder and the other mines in your backyard send mountains of coal rolling east on mile-long trains, fueling strangers’ lives while your own county pretends it’s a moral miracle. You export the apocalypse and clutch a library catalog like it’s contraband.

And for what? A couple of books on queer life and basic sex ed. This Book Is Gay. How Do You Make a Baby? Titles that have existed on school and public shelves for years without incident suddenly become sacrilege in the minds of a few loud moral entrepreneurs. So what did your wise local leaders do? They staged a purge, they installed a hand-picked purity squad on the library board, they fired a librarian who knew the First Amendment better than they knew the difference between policy and panic.

Her name is Terri Lesley. Her crime was refusing to make the library a Bible-thumping exhibit of fear. Her reward: a $700,000 settlement paid out of the pockets of the people who sat silent while this happened. You didn’t just lose civility — you subsidized the spectacle.

Let’s translate that into vernacular you understand: you bought the ticket, and now you’re taking the ride. Except this ride isn’t a carnival carousel — it’s a one-way trip to national ridicule.

YOUR LOCAL HEROES, A BRIEF ROSTER

The commissioners who blessed this farce. The library board members who traded professional ethics for moral posturing. The self-appointed “concerned parents” who used outrage like currency. Bravo. You have taken people’s taxpayer dollars and laundered them through your prejudices. You should be proud — if you like being the county that turned idiocy into a public line item.

THE IRONY IS PHYSICAL

You dig up enough coal to power the eastern seaboard for months. You ship it away. You never even come home to burn what you extract. You export smoke and profit, import hysteria. You’ll tear a mountain open to keep someone else’s lights on, but you’ll faint at the sight of a pronoun in a children’s book. That is not hypocrisy; that is performance art. It’s the perfect late-stage American tableau: industrial might and intellectual bankruptcy standing side by side, holding hands, and applauding a book-burning that never actually took place.

WHAT $700,000 COULD HAVE BOUGHT

A quick, non-exhaustive list of better uses for that money: school supplies, teacher pay bumps, public broadband, public health outreach, a dozen municipal pothole repairs, or funding for local programs that actually help kids rather than police their reading habits. Instead you purchased a moral panic. Enjoy your refund policy: nonexistent.

TO THE 86–87% WHO MADE THIS POSSIBLE

You waved flags and chanted “freedom” at rallies, and then you handed over your freedom to a board meeting. You voted in a political climate of slogans and reflex, and when the abstract idea of liberty asked for help, you cheered while your leaders trampled it. Silence was not neutral. Silence was the down payment.

TO THE ANTIFASCISTS, THE QUIET DISSENTERS, THE ONES WHO SHOWED UP

To teachers who slipped banned titles into backpacks, to librarians who quietly kept the shelves useful, to queer kids reading under covers and parents who asked questions: respect. You held the line in a place where the odds read like a punchline. You took the social heat so the rest of us wouldn’t have to. If courage had a zip code, yours would be Campbell County.

A FINAL NOTE — HUMBLY HUMILIATING, BUT ACCURATE

Frame the settlement check. Hang it on the wall of your county building next to whatever other moral trophies you collect. Add a plaque: “Paid in full by our fear of books.” Let future commissioners read it and decide if political theater is worth hiring an attorney.

Because the truth is merciless but tidy: you mined the coal, she mined the courage — and in the end, courage paid better.

Sincerely,
Rook T. Winchester
Closer to the Edge

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If you made it this far, you already know what’s at stake. Campbell County just paid a $700,000 tuition bill to the University of Consequences — and the syllabus is still being written. Closer to the Edge doesn’t have advertisers, lobbyists, or corporate handlers. We have readers — stubborn, brilliant, beautifully furious readers — who believe that truth should be printed even when it makes people squirm.