Make a gift in honor of the good that comes from BDN journalism in your hands, and help raise $60,000 this spring to support our reporting. Make a donation now.
Letters to the editor and obituaries are what my parents read as they got older. Seemed like it was the only thing they looked forward to when the newspaper arrived — what someone had to say about something and who could no longer say anything about anything.
Today the printed word is fading, at least from a newspaper’s perspective. Its blank pages sit waiting for something to fall onto them, to fill them from header to footer, squeezed like fresh orange juice between shrinking margins. One newspaper section that seems to never run out of things to say is the letters to the editor.
Opinion is alive and well in Down East, Maine, and so are a few newspapers. They cling to life because of readers like you, not yet ready to exit stage left for the illuminated dancing screens of computers, tablets or phones. Their fingers grip the thin, inked-ladened paper lovingly, holding onto something that “has been” for a long time. A pacifier that carries information while assuaging the fear of change.
People living here their entire life have been doing so without fear, because their letters to the editor say so. Public opinion is both cherished, welcomed and for the most part respected. It is a town meeting folded neatly between pages of print, sequestered until opened to be read, enjoyed, laughed at, disagreed with, embraced. It is democracy in real time from the kitchen table, fishing boat, office conference rooms and the soccer field.
The writer E.B. White was famous for his letters. The Pulitzer prize-winning writer also loved Maine. And after having moved here for good in 1938, to a farmhouse in Brooklin, White continued sharing his thoughts, his observations about life — and shared his opinion about many subjects via a letter to the editor in many Maine newspapers.
In 1978 the Pulitzer Prize board awarded E. B. White a special Pulitzer for “his letters, essays and the full body of his work.” White was 78 years old at the time. A year before winning, Harper and Row published a 686-page selection of those letters. The Pulitzer prize-winning critic William McPherson, writing for The Washington Post’s “Book World,” took pen to paper to write his review of The Letters of E.B. White.
In that review McPherson posited the following: “As anyone knows who’s recently read a note from his central databank, the letter as it used to be committed is all but dead. The writer has been supplanted by a computer operating under an assumed name in Hackensack, New Jersey, programmed to insert a personal reference — your name, perhaps — in the first and third paragraphs of every printout. Such a scrap of paper corresponds to the art of the letter as the voice of the telephone weather report does to conversation.
“And yet every now and then a live one flutters into the mailbox without having passed through Hackensack or even the Dictaphone; sometimes it has smudges on it. Several hundred of them arrived the other day, the collected Letters of E.B. White, printed, bound and jacketed in a single handsome volume. With careful rationing, they might last the winter. They prove once again that reading someone else’s mail can be a lot more fun than reading one’s own.”
E.B. White’s letters are as necessary as every letter addressed to the editor of our local newspapers. These vestiges of ourselves enlighten and inform; they inspire and cause one to pause and think. They engage, and they provide a soapbox for anyone to stand on and speak their mind.
Of course, White, too, had something to say on the importance of those letters: “Somehow the letters-to-the-editor page, strange and wonderful as it always is, is one of the chief adornments of the society we love and seek to clarify for the world. The privilege of writing to the editor is basic; the product is the hot dish of scrambled eggs that is America.”
The letter to the editor is democracy’s voice because it is our voice, especially in small towns and villages like those Down East. Where one’s opinion may be drowned out by the girth and groan of large cities, here, speaking one’s mind impacts the broader community by giving it a voice. When our words stop dripping from the tongue, when the newspapers go barren without our thoughts and opinions, when silence screams, then the place we live becomes that place we no longer recognize.
So, take that sip of coffee, place the newspaper back into its folds, take another bite of breakfast, then pick up that pen and paper and write a letter to your local newspaper editor. You and the place where you live will feel more engaged and made better because of it.
