The Editor's Desk

We love it when people e-mail us their letters to the editor, rather than mailing them conventionally or bringing by the office, because then we don’t have to type them into the system. It saves time and gets folks’ letters into the paper faster.

However, this whole Internet thing isn’t perfect. Once every couple of months somebody will e-mail me a letter to the editor, and for whatever reason it’s unreadable or corrupt or there’s some sort of odd technical issue (Right now, I’m trying to deal with the whole issue of reading .docx files because I’m on a Mac — they claim the built-in text reading file should open it, but I just get gobbledy gook). I e-mail the writer back to let them know there’s a problem, but sometimes I get no response. I got an unreadable letter to the editor last week, but the sender has not responded to me and so his or her letter can’t be published.

If you’re sending a letter to the editor through e-mail, make sure you’re using an e-mail address that you check on a regular basis. If there’s an issue with running your letter, you’ll never know otherwise and wonder why we haven’t run it. Failing that, if you e-mail in a letter to the editor and don’t see it in about two weeks, give us a call to find out what’s going on. Sometimes letters get lost in cyberspace and we never receive them at all.

A reader and regular letter-writer just called because he thought it was unfair of me to run my personal commentary regarding Proposition 8 on the same day I set as the deadline for submission of political letters.

I apologize: I wasn’t even thinking of that deadline that much when I planned when the commentary would run. I knew it would take several days to write that commentary to my satisfaction and figured Friday would be the best day to get that in there.

If you want to respond directly to my commentary, feel free to do so, and I’ll do my best to make room for you next week, regardless of today’s deadline, even if I have to do things like take out the editorial cartoon for a day, et cetera.

I’ll be at the Independence Day celebration Friday helping run the “beer garden” with my fellow Rotarians. Feel free to stop by and comment on anything you’d like to say about the content of the newspaper. And to buy some beer if you’re of age. The money is used to fund some of our local programs, such as the “Dictionary Project,” which provides free dictionaries to all Barstow area third graders every year.

Strangely, this will be the first time I’ve actually gotten to see Barstow’s fireworks show. Something has always prevented me from going out there until this year.

I had a very interesting conversation with a reader Tuesday. He had been an irregular reader of the Desert Dispatch but had recently started a full subscription. He had called because he was concerned that our opinion page “leaned” conservative. He had read one of Richard Reeb’s commentaries, but hadn’t yet seen one of Carol Jensen’s Monday pieces.

I explained to the caller that actually, my intent with the opinion page is to promote libertarian political views, while at the same time, accommodating other views as well.

There was one particularly illuminating moment in the conversation. Because he was more progressive, he was concerned that too much conservative opinion on the page, unchecked by an equal amount of progressive commentary, might influence people to believe in conservative politics.

In other words, he was concerned that we were encouraging people to believe in things that he didn’t want people to believe.

It was a real learning moment for me, because in my mind, of course the commentaries are trying to influence people to believe in the writer’s views — that’s what they’re for. The entire point of an opinion page is to influence and challenge what people believe.

But that’s not how the caller felt, and I should have probably known better. The rise of our pundit-based opinion culture has created a country where people believe the purpose of commentary is to validate what they believe. To tell them that they’re right and those other people are wrong. The purpose of running commentary from the “other side” is not for “balance,” like they want to believe. It’s so that they have somebody to be indignant about and prove wrong. The idea that there might actually be a third side (let alone a fourth or fifth) seems alien to people these days. Because Freedom Communication editorial writers have a libertarian perspective, we’ve been accused of being part of the “liberal media” when we write about individual rights and then accused of being “right wing pawns” when we write about property rights and support capitalism. There are people who really cannot perceive that there’s anything else out there.

The larger result has been bland, toothless opinion pages in other newspapers across the country, where editorials read like they’re written by a focus group and are designed to appeal to the pre-existing beliefs of the majority of the readership, not to actually influence anybody at all.

But I’m hopeful for change over the next 10 years. The fragmentation of the political parties might help. The increasing number of voices encouraging the Republican to turn back to a small-government mentality adds a new side to the discussion. Blogs have changed the dynamic in many ways — some just add to the pundit echo chamber, but a lot of them add nuance to the discussion, dissecting and pushing at the foundations of what we believe.

I will continue to try to challenge what people believe on our editorial page, and I don’t apologize for my — or any of my writers’ — efforts to actually influence people’s beliefs.

I put up a new poll question this week asking folks what they’re going to do with their stimulus checks. It seems as though, so far, we’re not interested in the task of allegedly stimulating the economy with new purchases. Instead, most of the voters so far say they’ll use the check to pay down their debts and to pay for basic necessities. This is amusing in the sense that if the government hadn’t taken that money away from us in taxes in the first place, we might not have had the debt to pay down.

I too will be using the check to pay down debt, which will put me at 0-for-2 in using this money in the way the government wants me to. When we got the last “stimulus check” in 2001, I spent it all on a trip visiting some friends in Toronto, Canada, so all that money went to stimulate another nation’s economy.

I just can’t do anything the government wants me to do, can I?