The Editor's Desk

I frequently admire that people feel strongly about so many important issues that affect Americans.

However, if your response to an issue is to head to some Web site to have a form letter e-mailed out en masse as a letter to the editor, you probably don’t feel strongly enough about the issue to bother.

I’ve been inundated this morning with a collection of extremely similar e-mails from different e-mail addresses complaining that the Bush Administration is declining to get involved in a Supreme Court case regarding whether investors can sue to recoup money when a company is charged with fraud, like Enron.

We don’t run form letters. Very few newspapers do, if they know what they’ve received is a form letter. The intent of the letters section of the newspaper is for readers to tell the public their opinions in their own words, not filtered through some other activist group’s Language Conformity Machine.

And newspapers our size don’t even run letters from people with no connection to their coverage area. These letters are coming from all over the place, not from Barstow. Most of them are being deleted without being read.

So if you’re mad and you don’t want to take it anymore, and your response is to get a Web site to do your work for you, you’re not nearly mad enough.

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