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Brooks Peterson

Monday, March 26, 2001
Our readers have found their voices

I know these are at least mildly turbulent times for our city, what with the continuing, ah, differences of opinion over the selection of a new superintendent for CCISD, a City Council and mayoral election pending, and - by no means least - that little matter of Packery Channel.
   But you know what? From the standpoint of the grimy wretches who stoke the editorial furnaces, things are definitely looking up. Or let me put it another way: The citizenry has shaken off its torpor and gotten engaged in all manner of continuing disputations, debates and dialogues.
   How do I know this? The answer is simplicity itself: I have but to cast a glance at the Letters column.
   Perhaps you've noticed? In fact, there has been a veritable eruption of reader input over the last three to four weeks.
   The ebb and flow of contributions to the Letters column is in fact one of the endlessly fascinating things about being in this line of work. Feast one day, famine the next.
   I suppose if I were of a clinical, scientific turn of mind, I might make some kind of systematic effort to figure the whole thing out. But that's not me. I yam what I yam, as Popeye, the proto-existentialist, was fond of saying.
   At any rate, for aficionados of the Letters section, these are heady times. After a letters drought that began during the holidays but stretched on alarmingly into February, you readers, bless your hearts, have found your voices again.
   Boy, have you ever.
   You might attribute it to the aforementioned City Council election cum Tax-Increment Financing district referendum.
   Certainly that's been one of the elements in play. The reaction to the Packery Channel proposal has been, to say the least, rather sharply defined: fear, loathing and doom on one side, blue skies and happy times on the other.
   But it's not just Packery and municipal politics by any means. Nossirree. There are also the old stand-bys: people writing in to express their joy and gratification at their purses/wallets having been found and returned intact; other people writing in to lament the fact that their purses/wallets were filched and not returned.
   There are also the inevitable letters, even now, bemoaning the pernicious impact of Bill Clinton on home, motherhood and the flag - and why not? His last gesture, those highly fragrant eleventh-hour pardons, was just the sort of thing to leave his detractors and admirers alike agape. (What is it with this guy, we ask ourselves for the zillionth time. So much promise, so little couth.)
   Of course, George W. Bush is coming in for more and more flak from letter writers, but there's not quite the same virulence to the critiques. (But give 'em time.)
   Actually, though, one of the things I enjoy most about the Letters column is its endless variety and utter unpredictability. Currently, for instance, we have a dandy little polemic being waged between Portland and Flour Bluff, both of which communities harbor their share of rugged individualists who are not given to mincing words. The exchanges recall siege engines being rolled up to medieval castles, even as the defenders ready the boiling oil. Hot time in the old town(s) tonight!
   Of all the exchanges that have been acted out in the Letters space, however, one of my all-time favorites was a protracted debate - conducted with great intensity but striking civility - over the merits (or lack thereof) of Theosophy, the mystical belief system propagated by Madame Blavatsky in the late 19th century, incorporating strains of Hinduism and Buddhism and postulating the transmigration of the soul. I think. The erudition and commitment of the combatants was obvious, and I felt a real sense of loss when the correspondence finally ended.
   Now, I ask you: Who else gives you that? Nobody but your local Letters section, pal.
   How you not gonna love it?

Brooks Peterson can be reached by phone at 886-3772, or by e-mail at petersonb@caller.com

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