As much as talking about kindness the past couple of weeks has cheered me, it’s time to get back into more serious matters.

We’ve spent several months with no shortage of letters, thanks largely to the craziness (not the fun kind) going on in the world, but that somewhat steady stream has now slowed to a trickle. While we still get a lot of letters, so many of them are from people who send multiple letters a week and/or people for whom their 30 days have yet to expire, or people who don’t live in Arkansas. We also get letters that are far beyond our 300-word limit (the average number of words that fit in about 7 inches of column space).

As a reminder, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Voices page is meant for Arkansas voices, so letter-writers must be current residents, while guest column-writers can be current or former residents (which is how former colleagues and others can continue to make their voices heard even though they’re now living elsewhere). Whether letter or guest column, writers can only appear on the page once in a 30-day period, which is a longtime rule meant to keep the page from featuring the same three or four writers every week who aren’t on our payroll. (So, “no” to the insistent writer who proposes “letter” and “quip” categories and that writers can get one of each in a 30-day period. It’s hard enough to keep track of letters and columns sometimes, and you want to add another category for letters of 10 words or less? Nope.)

Over the past couple of decades, the pool of letter-writers has shrunk, due to deaths (there are some whose absence is keenly felt, such as Karl Kimball and David Sixbey; Karl, a longtime conservative, and I built up a nice rapport over the years, and were able to put politics aside for genuine conversation), moves out of state, and a shortage of people willing to sign their names to their missives in an increasingly toxic political environment.

For some, it’s much easier to be a troll unaccountable for words and actions than to put your name and reputation on the line, regardless of the fact that standing behind your words and taking responsibility for any harm they may do is the honorable thing.

So does that mean we’ll lighten up on some rules, such as on statements of fact? On that rule, nope. Recall I came from the news side, having spent the first couple of decades of my career there in television and the newspaper, so facts are important to me. Plus, I still remember, early in my days in opinion, a letter that was printed of Thomas Jefferson quotes that weren’t actually Thomas Jefferson quotes (that was before I was the Voices editor, but it still chafes). Believe me, quotes are checked far more rigorously now, which is one reason they may appear slightly different to how you wrote them (if the quote is just slightly off, I’ll fix it, but if it’s off to the point that the point of your letter is changed, it may be tossed).

So when I get letters that claim, as one recent one did, that the “United States of America is the only country in the world that cannot decide who can be a citizen,” I have to check it.

I knew it was wrong before I ever checked it since I know multiple people with birthright citizenship/dual citizenship (members of military families, for example, may be posted overseas when a birth happens; one friend was born in the U.K. to American parents and holds dual citizenship, and John McCain was born on a base in Panama, but was still eligible to run for president here). But I still dove in to confirm.

A simple Google search is enough to show that more than 30 countries, including Canada and Mexico, also have some form of birthright citizenship. Yet on his first day back in office, Donald Trump said, “Birthright, that’s a big one. It’s ridiculous. We are the only country in the world that does this with the birthright, as you know, and it’s just absolutely ridiculous.”

On that, PolitiFact noted: “There are about three dozen countries that have unrestricted birthright citizenship, also known as ‘jus soli,’ or ‘right of the soil.’ The U.S. is joined by neighbors Canada and Mexico, along with nearly every country in Central and South America. … The U.S. has maintained its birthright laws despite experiencing high levels of immigration.

“Some European nations, meanwhile, have chosen to modify their citizenship requirements over the years. Ireland ditched its birthright citizenship law in 2005, and France jettisoned its own in 1993. But other nations maintain a version of birthright citizenship.”

Further, PolitiFact notes, “the 14th Amendment says that ‘all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. A 1952 statute echoes the amendment’s language, reading in part: ‘The following shall be nationals and citizens of the United States at birth: (a) a person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.'”

So, no, not only do other countries have some birthright citizenship, ours is written into our Constitution as an amendment, which would require far more than an executive order to change, no matter how much this president likes to ignore the Constitution.

Had the letter-writer attributed the statement to the person who made the claim (Trump), it might have been printed on the Voices page (as it is, it appears it was printed, at least online, by a Louisiana newspaper that doesn’t fact-check letters; we do our best not to print letters that have appeared in other papers). That didn’t happen.

Unfortunately, this situation happens a little too often for my tastes, especially when we’re short on letters. And from talking to editors at other papers and seeing comments and columns from other letters editors, the situation isn’t just happening here.

Still, we persist, if only because we still think the readers’ voices are important.

Some will, of course, yell (always with the yelling), “This letter is my opinion! You can’t fact-check opinion!” You’re right, we can’t, but we can check statements of fact, which means that if you state something as a fact with no indication that it’s your opinion, we will check it (OK, I say we, but there’s only one person, me, who checks letters; that’s what happens in a small department).

It’s a fine line sometimes determining what can be considered a statement of fact and someone’s opinion. You can call Zohran Mamdani a socialist because he has described himself as such (though technically he, like Bernie Sanders, is a democratic socialist, which is really a whole other ball of wax and not as scary as some would like you to believe); Barack Obama, on the other hand, is not (according to him, to economists and other experts on socialism). You can say you believe Obama is a socialist, as that is clearly opinion, but just saying “Obama is a socialist” is false. Sometimes in editing, we must hedge a little to make it clear that something is the writer’s opinion, which is what would probably happen in this case.

And if you think the right is the only side that gets fact-checked, you’re very wrong. There have been letters on the left that left me wondering how they came up with what they wrote since it had little in common with reality. Wishful thinking doesn’t restrict itself to one side of the aisle. For example, Joe Biden, as he was leaving office, said that the Equal Rights Amendment is part of the Constitution. If it were, I don’t think a lot of what’s going on now would be happening. Nice dream, but not true.

Want to improve your chances of getting your letter in? Follow the rules. Stay within the word limit (not only do you forestall my cursing as I attempt to edit you down, it’s far easier to get in short and midsized letters more quickly). Don’t call specific letter-writers idiots, morons or the like (they’re not public figures and didn’t sign up for that). Don’t use language that would make your grandma smack you upside the head or that you don’t commonly see in the newspaper (we don’t print “vomit,” “barf,” “fart” and several others unless they’re integral to a story, for instance), or explicit descriptions you wouldn’t want to read while eating your breakfast. Don’t use form letters, and we don’t print poems. Keep it civil. Don’t quote chapter and verse of any religious text (this isn’t Bible study; you can quote a verse, but no citation). Attribute statements of fact and/or give me your sources for fact-checking.

And, perhaps most importantly, write.