To the Editor:
Every now and then someone impugns a newspaper for publishing a “letter to the editor” that, in their view, express opinions inappropriate for public consumption.
How privileged we are, and how comforting it is to know, that living among us are some people who have been anointed to tell the editor and his staff what is appropriate opinion and thought and what is not.
Editorial page editors are under no obligation to “spoon-feed” its readers. What our newspapers have done, and continue to do, is provide all of us with an opportunity to be heard; to express openly our thoughts and opinions even though some of us may lack the literary sophistication and urbane elegance of a Hemingway or Faulkner. For that, they should be praised, not criticized.
There will always be the narrow-minded and cognitively compromised, but as long as we have free speech and a free press, I think there is no danger of the government or the superstitious self-righteous expropriating our Constitutional freedoms.
It is well we remember the words of the late journalist H.L. Mencken: “I know of no human right that is more valuable as the simple right to utter what seems (at the moment) to be the truth. Take away this right, and none other is worth a hoot; nor indeed, can any other long exist.”
Borden Applegate
Jacksonville Beach
