Dear America,
Sometimes I read the letters from readers to a local publication called the "Reminder," which I believe is a franchise, so there may be one published in your area and delivered to your mail box for free every week or so. I never, however, read the comments sent to the New York Times, nor do I send comments to either publication, though my frustrations over what people seem to think, including some columnists at the Times and even editorialists like David Brooks, well up inside me and virtually compel me to write these letters even though I suspect that no one reads them. Underlying that frustration has been the presumption that almost no one, if anyone at all, sees the problems we face in accurate terms as evinced by those comments published in the Reminder. In the Reminder, the letters are almost always uninformed if not misinformed or even dysinformed in ways that are not matters of opinion but rather reflect objective errors, that is, factual errors: Obama has raised the tax on rent, the XL pipeline will create millions of jobs and will link Alberta with the Gulf Coast, common core requirements are the federal government's attempt to take over local and state educational institutions so as to control what we think, gun registration is a threat to our freedom as a nation in that it is how the federal government will find us to take away our guns and oppress us, and the like. Such opinions as those relative to the common core issue, to choose just one, in that they seem so commonly held are a virtual indictment of our educational institutions as they functioned before the common core and they commend the very thing they condemn. They manifest the fact that someone needs to improve our methods for teaching the young how to think, which is not the same as teaching them what to think. The paranoid among us rightfully fear such mind control, but common core requirements do not threaten us that way in that they don't relate to imbuing us with ideas; rather they inculcate in our students the capacity to reason for themselves...to think with their own heads rather than someone else's as I am fond of saying. The opinions of David Brooks, on the other hand, employ erudition to propound ideas that may or may not be valid, and to advocate for subscription to them. That, it seems to me, is somewhat more menacing, which also acts to compel me to write to you like this. My consternation over all this is fueled by the assumption that no one is arguing such points to any effect with regard to the opinions of one so illustrious as Brooks, much less disabusing the Reminder's letter writers of their erroneous notions.
To put it concisely, I have been daunted by the generalized presumption that readers of both the Reminder and the New York Times (in consequence of the misinformation it disperses with surprising frequency) don't seem to make distinctions between fact and pronouncement...between other people's opinions and the truth, which may or may not comport with one another. And in a presumption that, as it turns out, was unjustified, I feared that even among the readers of the newspaper that is attributed by many with veracity above that of all others, no one seemed to be reasoning with any greater acumen for the task than were the readers of the Reminder, at least not in my experience. But this week I read several of the comments of readers of one of David Brooks' editorials and I was surprised by their quality and perspicacity. Brooks reported the findings of a scholar whom he apparently respects relative to the role of education in reversing income and wealth inequality. That scholar's thesis was that raising the educational levels of workers would serve to equalize the levels of prosperity of workers relative to management/ownership. But there are soritical flaws in that proposition, most prominent...I might say glaring...among them being that someone has to mop floors and fix cars, and that will be the case whether we all have Ph.Ds or not. I think that the problem we face as a society in this regard isn't that some people aren't qualified to do the more sophisticated work of a technologically advancing society. The problem is that those on the top of the labor-mangement/ownership pyramid have insufficient respect for those who perform the labor from which they benefit financially and on which they rely in their personal lives. The problem isn't that we don't pay the grill worker the same remuneration as we give to the owner of the franchise. The problem is that the franchise owner benefits from the labor of many, but pays them inadequately relative to the importance of what they do...for him. In other words, he doesn't attribute to them the significance of their efforts in the creation of his wealth. And, while there is certainly a correlation between what we see as the deficiencies of life among the working poor on the one hand, and what they earn on the other, the notion that those deficiencies are a function of a lack of objective moral and ethical standards in consequence of the failure of the labor force to acquire graduate degrees, which is what Brooks' contends in his piece, is that soritical error to which I referred earlier. But much to my relief, the readers of the New York Times see that too...almost univocally if their comments are any indication.
I suppose the bottom line for me personally is that my letters to America are not feeble, isolated efforts to be heard over the tidal surf of ideas held by the vast majority. There is a debate going on among us, and both sides are represented. They just don't read the same things.
Your friend,
Mike
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