August 13, 1984, Postal Workers and the Cost of Living

Many of the letters I’ve written to the editor have concerned the stand the paper has taken with the Postal Service. We moved to Virginia Beach in December of 1978 when we bought the bakery. 

In September of 1981 we sold the bakery and I began working for the Post Office.  In 1982 I had my first article, “Hope for the Holidays” published in The Virginian Pilot.  The following year I had several more articles published with the paper including two in their experimental Sunday Magazine, Virginia.

  

I thought the paper and I had a pretty good relationship. And then it happened.

    My feeling was that no one should tell a working man that he is making to much money or that he shouldn’t try to make more money.  According to their editorial, postal workers were making about $28,000 at the time.  Should we have been making only $25,000 or could we have expected to make $30,000.  I mean, what was their problem? 

Should a baseball player make $30 million a year?  Hell no!  But baseball players are in a class of their own and the $28,000 we were making seemed to be well within the ballpark figure for a middle class worker at the time.   As postal workers we should have been able to get whatever the Postal Service agreed to pay us, which for every  contract between the union and the Postal Service had been decided by an outside arbitrator.   It was between us, them and the arbitrator, not the paper.

Now papers have a right to their opinions and they have a right to be wrong but I felt like I had a right to tell them they were wrong. 

Now, one of the things I want to happen when I write a letter to a newspaper is for someone to respond.  That is the whole

purpose in the first place—to start some kind of dialogue. 

What I was looking for was maybe an argument from the paper or maybe a UPS or FedEx worker saying I made enough money.  What I wasn’t prepared for was the response I got from a mother in Portsmouth who didn’t want to argue economics or fair pay or inflation.  All she was concerned about was that she didn’t get any pay for the job she did and what right did I have to complain. I wanted to point out that most postal workers are also parents but I didn't. That might have drawn a response even further removed from the original premise of the newspaper that postal workers get paid too much. 

 She was arguing a social problem and maybe she had a point but I was arguing a labor problem and as any arbitrator will tell you, "them's apples and oranges."

October 4, 1995, Jurors Didn't Anguish Over Evidence

This jury had a little bit bigger responsibility than the Devil In Miss Jones jury. The problem is they chose not to accept that responsibility. Like a lot of people I had a problem with their verdict but I had a bigger problem with the speed they seemed to arrived at that verdict. It came after only four hours of deliberation. Hell the car chase on the San Diego Freeway leading to his arrest took longer than that. 

It’s over 20 years since I wrote my first letter to a paper complaining about a jury being forced to watch a movie to determine if people could voluntarily watch the movie.  In that instance I thought the jury was being asked to do too much.  With the O.J. Simpson jury I felt the jury didn’t do enough.  They didn’t even come close.

Of course there were more than just Cochran and the jury to blame for this miscarriage of justice.  Watching this trial for the many months that it went on, one could easily recall the words of Casey Stengel when he was managing the New York Mets: “Can anyone play this game?”

The judge made mistakes, the police made mistakes, the prosecution, the defense, and the press.  If they were catering this event you would have had to be a fool to even taste the food.  Everybody was suspect.

But at least I think everyone was trying to do their job the way they thought they should.  They knew what was expected of them and they tried to succeed.  I think they all failed but at least they tried.

Everyone except the jury, that is.  I don’t think they tried hard enough.  I can only imagine their frustration at having to give up so big a part of their lives for this charade that everyone else was getting famous for and rich from.  But still they could have tried harder.  They could have cared or at least have pretended to care.

Conservatives and Big Government

I sent this letter to the Virginian-Pilot a few days ago in response to several columns and news items that have appeared in the last week. I appears that the people demanding smaller government are having the most difficulty separating themselves from government.

For people who don’t like government—or at least big government—conservatives and the business interests that support them sure do know their way around Washington, especially the area around K Street.
 
A few days ago, Gail Collins wrote a piece about how the NRA practically wrote the  “Stand Your Ground” laws that exist in 21 states and are being proposed in other states including ours. There is no great demand for these laws on a personal level but the article points out that the NRA needs to push these laws in order to stay in the game, to continue to be relevant if they are to continue to pull in donations and supporters.
 
In today’s paper we read about the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) role, not just in passing legislation but also in writing legislation geared to union busting (Because unions gave us a middle class?), undermining environmental protection (Because clean air and water take a bite out of profits?), and tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy (one word-greed).

This same group—with support from companies like AT&T, Coca-Cola and UPS—promote privatization and outsourcing as effective methods of limiting government costs. And when hasn’t privatization and outsourcing worked out well in the long run?

Why Does Florida Take Its Sweet Time Making Every Decision

Why does Florida take its sweet time making every decision?

I know. You’re saying what’s the rush.
You’re probably also saying, “What the hell are you talking about?”

The most recent situation where Florida seems to be having difficulty acting in a timely manner is the case of a man killing a complete stranger who did nothing to provoke him.

The problem, it seems, is that no one can determine if the killing was justified. The city where it happened is investigating and the state is investigating and the federal government is investigating. The word going around is that a decision is a ways off still.

But aren’t all decisions in Florida always a ways off?

Yes, they are.

April 4, 1974, 'Why Should Jurors Sit as Art Critics?'

This was my introduction to the great American art of writing letters to the editor. Before this, I only wrote infrequent letters to friends and family and did so  most casual manner.    I really didn’t think I had much to say and began most of  my letters saying just that. "Hi, not much news…" and finished with "well I got to go now."

But back home and out of the Army and after a year spent as a writer in Vietnam I had grown pretty comfortable seeing my words in print and more importantly, I felt I had something to say. So in the tradition of Ben Franklin and Thomas Paine, on April 4, 1974 I jotted down and sent off my first, “Dear Editor” letter. 

I was living back in Rochester in the spring of 1974.  A movie was showing in town entitled, The Devil in Miss Jones, and there was a lot of controversy about whether the movie was art, pornography or just bad.

In the 50’s and 60’s there were many monumental court cases that dealt with serious issues and resulting in groundbreaking policy changes.  In the early 70’s we were entering a different era—one of frivolous trials where someone uses the courts to deal with very trivial issues resulting in no changes whatsoever.

In 1974, the nation was just a few months away from the presidential campaign of Jimmy Carter who would run on a heavily moral evangelical-based campaign to combat the evil doings of the recently passed Watergate scandal.