Letters to the Editor

As readers of Hell on Earth know, writing letters to the editor was often the only newspaper writing Hank did. The only drawback to letters to the editor is that there are not enough of them. The number of papers is decreasing as is the space given to letter writers. This is too bad because what we need most in this country right now is responsible public discourse.

Letters to the editor are being replaced by a little thing called “comments” on the Internet. There are hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of articles appearing on the Internet daily about every subject imaginable and at the end of each article for the small price of becoming a member someone can record a comment to the article they just read. The most important thing to know about these “comments” is that they do not represent responsible discourse.

Let’s look at how a Letter to the Editor(LETTER) differs from a Comment on a Website(Cow).

In the first place, a LETTER requires a real name whereas a COW can get by with something like Snookyburger or Catinmouse or Waggler.
A LETTER also requires a real address while a COW can be sitting in a bar in Tijuana with a laptop and a margarita or at a prison for the criminally insane—not that they don’t have a right to an opinion but wouldn’t you like to know this piece of information.

Just as it has to be written by a person with a real name and a real address, a LETTER has to have a real idea. Oh, it can be misguided or extreme or even very, very confusing but, bottom line, it has to be something that can be expressed in real words, which is the way responsible people communicate with each other. A COW writer only has to know where to find the #, @, $, &, !, and % keys on the keyboard.

There is always a real possibility of a LETTER turning into a real discussion with different people with different ideas joining the dialogue. This is not the case with COW’s where a reply of “##$@%” to “!!###$#@” followed by the rebuttal, “Oh yeah, #&$**##!#!!!” is really more like a time bomb waiting to go off.

The web, it turns out, isn’t really the place to go to find responsible discourse, which is too bad because a future where the top row of a keyboard becomes the main means of communication is going to be a real %##!$%#&&(*)^^%$# and I ain’t &%%$#!@@!#$ whistling Dixie.