Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, September 5, 1995 TAG: 9509080032
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Many of them are excellent writers. Sometimes witty, sometimes profound, almost always to the point, they can make us chuckle aloud or set our blood pressures rising or cause us to chide ourselves, ``Wish we'd said that.''
OccasionO ally, letter writers tell us about everyday heroes or problems in their neighborhoods, about which we'd otherwise be unaware.
Often they offer unusual perspectives or provocative views on everything from Bosnia to the New Century Council, from smoking teen-agers to single-gender military institutes. On the editorial-page staff, we talk a lot about letters. They can spur grand debates.
They also can make us wish we could sit down with writers over a cup of coffee or meet at a back-yard fence to talk over issues of the day.
"You want to know what the problem with [fill in the blank] is?" they'll ask. And we'll want to know. And we'll want to give our two cents' worth.
Come to think of it, you want to know what a problem with our society is? We don't have enough conversations.
Oh, we hear plenty of the kind of talk wherein one person yells something, and another yells something else, and both are hollering as if into a void. We hear lots of assertions vehemently delivered. We hear all the time: We're right and everybody else is wrong.
Where is this getting us? If volume and passion and ideological intensity are all that count, extremes can drown out more moderate tones, and understanding becomes more difficult.
What we don't hear enough nowadays - and this is hardly an original observation - is the kind of civil, congenial discussion that people carry on face to face, in taverns and breakfast cafes, at the bowling alley or the farmer's market, at the laundromat or watching Little League.
The value of such discussions is not that people agree. Disagreements can be serious and spirited. The difference is that someone is responding, with at least minimal attention and respect, to what someone else is saying. It's a conversation. It's something democracies need.
Can we converse on an opinion page? We think so. We have never regarded these pages as a mouthpiece for just the newspaper's editorial views. We try to provide a forum for community discussion that spans a wide range of opinions, of which ours is only one.
Still, we end up publishing a lot of assertions that barely engage one other, except to denounce or discredit.
As part of efforts to carry the discussion a bit further, we're introducing today a feature dubbed ``Talking It Over.''
The idea is to play up an occasional letter we find of special interest, write a reaction, then invite the reader to react to what we've said. We'll package the give and take in the letters columns.
In the interest of continued conversation, we'll even give the featured letter writer what on these pages we usually reserve for ourselves: the last word.
by CNB