More than one wise person in my life has told me that I’ll never be able to please everyone. Heck, I can’t even please all cats, so why would I think humans were any easier?
I wouldn’t. Cats tend to be much easier, especially if you have some bites of egg or chicken on you. I’m usually most offensive to cats when I cough or sneeze in their general vicinity, as it’s apparently a great insult to their ancestors (I apologize a lot when I cat-sit during allergy season), or I forget for a few hours to clean their litterbox (usually because I’m writing and/or editing for this job).
If only my critics (and those of other people at the paper) were as easily assuaged and could understand that I’m not all-powerful (I’m not even mid-powerful) and can only work with what I have.
What I have much of the time, just as with other newspapers across the country that aren’t nationwide, is a limited number and range of letters for the Voices page. So when someone complains about vitriol on the page when I’ve so often pleaded for people at large to appeal to their better angels, well … I have to remind that I’m, again, not all-powerful.
Oh, if only I were …
There’d be a lot fewer people placing the lives of all women (including trans women) in danger by, oh, let’s say claiming that an athlete born female who is competing in women’s boxing in the Olympics is actually a man. Considering her country of Algeria is not exactly LGBTQ-friendly, she could be in real danger upon her return home (with an Olympic medal, at least a bronze as of this writing), simply because she doesn’t fit some people’s image of a woman, despite being born and living as a female her entire life.
The International Boxing Association, which is heavily influenced by its Russian sponsors, had disqualified that boxer and another woman from its 2023 world championships, claiming they “pretended to be women” and “tried to deceive their colleagues,” according to Mother Jones. The tests that supposedly revealed XY chromosomes haven’t been clarified by the group. And it wouldn’t matter anyway, since women can have XY chromosomes and still be women (like those who have Swyer Syndrome).
American non-binary Olympic athlete Nikki Hiltz commented on the controversy on their Instagram account: “Anti-trans rhetoric is anti-woman. These people aren’t ‘protecting women’s sports,’ they are enforcing rigid gender norms and anyone who doesn’t fit perfectly into those norms is targeted and vilified.”
People would think before they spoke, wrote, or posted on social media. Words are powerful, especially in the hands of someone well-known, so when people like J.K. Rowling (whom I once admired) post things like her accusation about the Olympic boxer, it’s hard not to lose faith in humans as a species. Watching how low people will go to hurt others for no reason other than they don’t fit an image or believe as others do is disheartening, and not at all what I was taught as a child.
There would be more letters to the editor coming in every day that didn’t insult specific other readers (public figures and amorphous groups don’t apply, within reason); go on and on about things that have been proved fraudulent, especially without citing sources; use form letters or plagiarism (citing sources applies to more than just fraudulent claims; don’t try to pass off someone else’s work as your own); didn’t rehash imagined slights from other readers or politicians not even relevant now; weren’t the same writers ignoring the 30-day cooling-off period; and weren’t just the same talking points over and over.
You know I’m no fan of politics, but that doesn’t mean politics is verboten in letters; heck, we’d be lucky to have one letter a day if that were the case. The plain fact is that not as many people write letters to the editor anymore, and some newspapers have even begun eliminating them (the Bellingham Herald in Washington, for example, calls them “a thing of the past” and “too difficult to verify and generally rife with misinformation,” according to the Post Alley blog). For now, anyway, we plan to keep running letters, but readers have to remember that Voices can only work with what it gets. We get more liberal to center-right letters than very conservative ones, and more of them tend to be written in a way that they can pass fact-checks with little trouble. I would absolutely love to get more letters, period, but more letters from conservative readers would be wonderful.
But ya know, none of this matters in the big picture because someone will always find a way to be offended. Some seem to even think that the right to be offended is in the Bill of Rights.
If you want to complain, feel free; it’s your right. However, that doesn’t then mean no one can complain about what you said or did. That’s the thing about living here in the U.S., where we are all entitled to the same rights … and oops, there’s no right to be free from criticism.
Sorry ’bout that.
Assistant Editor Brenda Looper is editor of the Voices page. Email her at blooper@adgnewsroom.com. Read her blog at blooper0223.wordpress.com.