Up The Mainstream

Dear Readers,

As I write, it has been more than a week since the email I wrote to friends and family about Sarah Palin began to ping-pong around the country. In that time I’ve received over 9,600 emails. I’ve lost track of the number of journalists--maybe 3 dozen?-- who have challenged me to provide sources to substantiate all that I mentioned in it. I have cooperated fully with everyone, providing all the information anyone has requested, and offering all the help I could.

It is a strange thing to have your words echo back to you from around the world. If I were to write my email today, I would make the following changes.

1) If I could change one word, it would be the word “hate”. I said Sarah Palin hated me. That was inappropriate. I should have said that Sarah knows that she lost my support when she sought to remove books that she didn’t like from the library.

One of the great things that America has given the world is the tradition of irenic debate: the understanding that we can agree to disagree, that there is a difference between disagreeing and disliking. I failed to demonstrate that important concept when I used the word “hate”. Sarah has always been polite and gracious to me in public. I don’t know how she feels about me, and it was inappropriate for me to use that ugly word to describe her feelings.

2) I wrote: “While Sarah was Mayor of Wasilla she tried to fire our highly respected City Librarian because the Librarian refused to consider removing from the library some books that Sarah wanted removed.”

I should NOT have written “. . . because the Librarian refused . . . “ . I should have written “ . . . .after the Librarian refused. . . . “

3) If I were to write my email today I would add that I have no recollection of what specific book titles Mayor Palin wanted removed from the library, or if she even named any. There is a list of books out there; I know nothing about that list! It looks bogus to me.

4) I wrote: ““PTA mom”: true years ago when her first-born was in elementary school, not since”.

This appears to have been a somewhat inaccurate statement. Sarah Palin has referred to herself as a “PTA mom” for so long that I just assumed it was true. Having been active in PTA since 1996, I assumed that she was an officer before that. Even McCain, when announcing her as his running mate, referred to her executive experience in PTA. But the Alaska State PTA office says it has no record of Sarah Palin ever having been a PTA board member; they do record that she paid dues.

5) I wrote: “Nor has her life-style ever been anything like that of native Alaskans.”

I should have capitalized “native”, as in: Eskimo, Inupiat, Athabascan, etc.

For your information, I do not have a website, and I don’t blog. So if you see my name out there attached to anything besides my original email and this, it’s somebody else trying to smear me.

The response to my email has been totally unexpected and amazing. I am SO impressed and heartened! My inbox is full of story after story of generous, courageous, everyday people who have made personal sacrifices for the common good: stories of quiet courage. We are a nation of unsung heroes!

And ours is truly a Christian country. It is obvious to me that people are really trying hard to practice the Christian faith that they profess. I am so pleased by the thoughtful, respectful arguments that people have put forward for why they have chosen one ticket or the other. The vast majority of the people out there reject the Karl Rovian politics of personal destruction and wish that campaigns could be free of “spin” and “image”.

I am pleased to know that the overwhelming majority of the readers of my email found the information helpful.

Dozens of journalists have researched what I have said. They have found nothing else to be inaccurate.

Anne Kilkenny
September 9, 2008