2008.10.16
Discuss Thursday's letters and local commentary
English to campaign-ese
By John Long
Long, director of the Salem Museum and a history teacher at Roanoke College, is a Roanoke Times columnist.
I remember my fascination with the first presidential campaign in which I could vote (1984 -- Reagan vs. Mondale). I was transfixed by the debates, the press coverage, editorial arguments, etc. But with each successive election since, I've become more jaded. Not that I'm less interested. But the campaigns now go on for so long and descend into such irrelevancies that I find myself wishing we could vote and be done with it. Please, no more commercials that end in "and I approved this message."
The cool guys were just drunks
John Freivalds
Freivalds runs a communications firm in Lexington.
It would be nice to be able to point a finger at the leaders of Wall Street financial firms and say, "You made this mess happen," have trials, find them guilty, take way the money they "earned," and throw them in jail. And, yes, tar and feather them and parade them naked through the streets. We did that with the Enron crowd.
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Frievald's analogy perfectly exemplifies the lack of personal responsibility that caused this problem. Sure the Wall Street boys are guilty of taking profits from the public's lack of control. But they are not the drunks in the story. They are the bartenders. The members of the public who accepted loans the couldn't afford are the drunks. They didn't know when to say when, and the bartenders realized they were drunk, but didn't cut them off.
Unfortunately Frievald demonstrates what is wrong with America to blame. We always want to blame someone else when we screw up.
Comment by C Ramsey — October 17, 2008 @ 9:05 pm