Letters to the Editor
Argiri
Published Letters: 29 Editor's Choice: 5
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Not really...
[Read the article: I hate your column and all the letter writers too!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I like your column and respect your effort to help people. Expecting you to be right all the time is as unreasonable as it sounds.
To hazard a guess, I think the LW's ire may be prompted by something that I myself find scary. That is, how helpless so many people seem to be, and how frighteningly easy many of us are to victimize; what ghastly problems beset basically well-meaning and innocent people. Anyone who has a friend mired in a domestic mess and seemingly unable to take the obvious steps to get free most likely gets mad with that friend in much the same way. We probably get mad because we can imagine ourselves in some similar position of indignity, similarly helpless. That's not pleasant.
It has intrigued me that people respond so often; surely most of them, like myself, have plenty of other things to do. I think those letters are responses to the plight of us all, though. Empathetic, nasty, or anything between, at least they reflect something other than indifference.
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Please don't
[Read the article: A grad student in China has taken possession of my soul]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's much more comfortable to regret something you didn't do than to writhe with shame for years about something you did do. Giving in to this kind of impulse is an open invitation to the kind of pain and humiliation that can bend and break even a young person who has extra energy to dedicate to emotional distress. I can't even imagine the impact on someone who's in his thirties and has a life, a conscience, and a working knowledge of action and consequence. Watch porn, eat chocolate, write poetry or fiction, do any legal substitutional thing that works. Tell yourself that the object of your affections, if aware of them at all, is probably playing you for a green card. In this wicked world, the odds that it's true are pretty good, as one other respondent suggests.
What is disastrous if put into practice as action is often great grist for the creative mill. Abandoning your wife for a stranger is an unretractable transition into an experience that you will not control. It will control you. The same deed, kept in the realm of your imagination, becomes material that you can control, from which you may be able to make something.
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Let them drink coffee...
[Read the article: The Frappuccino generation]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This country has a criminal government which, if there's any justice in this world, will end up being prosecuted en masse for war crimes. We have torn up two sovereign nations in our search for terrorists who quite obviously are smarter than we are, and organizationally our superiors. To keep up with the rest of the planet, most of which is gunning for us, we need all the caffeine we can get. Myself, I love caffeine. Bring it on. And if we're going to have a ridiculous school system that keeps teenagers busier than lawyers used to be, those teens are entitled to their stimulants too. I used to have to make carefully-timed sprints to the teachers' lounge to get Cokes from the machine there in order to torque myself up for the hours of unspeakable numbing boredom that high school was and, presumably, still is. While there was a certain diversion in this daily challenge, I see no reason to make it inconvenient for anyone of any age to fulfill a reasonable need and support commerce at the same time.
Seriously, this will be like my responses to other articles by folks obsessing about what other people eat and drink: get over it. In view of the real conflagrations going on as you wrote and as I write, the significance of other people's menu choices is less than zero, and such choices are none of your business to boot. So, eat/drink somewhere else/something else if you object to Starbucks and its coffee, and leave it and its customers in peace. Their habits or addictions are their own problem/business, nothing you need to worry about - how many times, after all, has someone shoved the business end of a .45 into the back of your neck because he needed cash to buy coffee?
Review a book, research a real subject, get a life. Grrr, this kind of intellectual running-in-place irritates the hell out of me. I need to keep my resolution to stop reading it. Good night, all.
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Wait a minute!
[Read the article: LASIK surgery ruined my eyes]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Never mind all the scout-camp fireside oratory about accepting the results of one's actions! The ill-advised advice of the best friend, too, is very much a sideline. This sounds like one of those times that one sues the holy hell out of one's doctor. That's where the energy in this affair belongs. People do it for quite frivolous reasons, but this sounds like one of those situations where it's not only legitimate but righteous to sue - a platinum-plated shoo-in of a lawsuit. The letterwriter's vision is severely compromised, with crushing psychological stress as well as disability in consequence.
The same principle that applies to the best friend, though, applies to me too; I'm not a lawyer, and a lawyer's advice is what's needed. Letterwriter, find yourself a fierce doctor-eating lawyer amongst the many who specialize in medical malpractice suits. And, from here on out, take your medical advice from a medical professional who has earned your trust through competence, not a friend.