To the editor:

As you gradually lose clear eyesight, the lines on a page begin to get a little fuzzy and at first, you might not even notice it happening. Did we even notice when our vision between what we viewed as right and wrong in this country began to blur? Yet it’s been going on for years.

Some actions seemed harmless: speeding, taking cash under the table, filing a bogus insurance claim, lying to get yourself off the hook, not reporting income to the IRS, cheating on a test, making false statements on a resume. What was the harm if you didn’t get caught or no one called out your behavior? You might feel a little guilty, but then after a while, you justified it by saying to yourself: “Well, everybody does it.”

And then the new standard in our society became: It is OK to blur the line between right and wrong, truth and falsehood, as long as it serves the purpose of getting you what you want and you don’t get caught. The goal is to try and outsmart the law or other people. That gives you a little thrill of feeling like a “winner.” Apparently how you “play the game” in sports, business, society or politics isn’t relevant anymore.

If people can justify in their mind that it’s all right to break a law for their own purposes, then they will happily support those types of actions in someone else. That explains why there are people, including our president and the Republicans defending him, who believe that asking a foreign country to dig up dirt on an opponent is acceptable behavior, even though it means breaking some laws in the process. They see these actions as simply doing whatever you have to do to “win.”

Since people see nothing wrong with a little bending of rules or ethics; they vehemently defend this president’s actions and discredit the basis for an investigation. Elise Stefanik will “bend” the truth when releasing a statement saying that the president did nothing wrong because he did send aid to Ukraine, but conveniently leave out the fact that the aid had already been withheld for 11 months and was only released after the whistleblower reported it. She will defend Trump’s innocence by stating that there was no Ukrainian investigation into the Bidens, but will conveniently not mention the lack of Trump’s ethics for asking a foreign power to help him with his reelection in the first place. What the president did and why he did it makes perfect sense to his supporters, and they have no problem with it.

But to the people in this country who still believe in being honest, loyal, law-abiding citizens, what the president did is just plain wrong. Impeachment makes sense. To those who still support rule of law as dictated by our Constitution, the president has not demonstrated integrity, transparency or moral character. Citizens with a clarity of ethical vision see through the political tactics being used to blur the essential question. That question is whether we as a country will accept the actions of a president who is willing to use his power any way he wants, to get what he wants.

Martha Hodges

Massena