Dear WAMO:
Are you kidding? I've won awards for my editorials, and some have been political. For example, here's the full text of an editorial I wrote at the age of 24 way back in 1966, when I was news editor of the Casper (Wyo.) Star-Tribune. How about reading it and give me your expert opinion as to how good (or bad) it is, in your estimation?
Setting A Course
Out of all the issues and counter-issues, charges and counter-charges, a national psychosis should be recognized as inevitable.
Never has America had such a guilt complex -- and for no valid reason.
The young liberals conduct their demonstrations in an atmosphere of special privilege which they would be quick to deny to their elders and to the more conservative element of the society in which they live.
The Diggers pick up the tab for the Hippies, and if they are $6,000 short, that's the name of the game.
Discussion of sex is so rampant that even politicians fall into the trap, and a Senator from Illinois talks about a possible Republican ticket as "sexy but impossible." The Senator also has hopes, and he is not about to give in to the Governors.
The President of the United States is called a "phony" and partisan politics dominate national intention.
Private communications, reprehensible as they may be, are diverted and laughed off.
What are the ethical values of America?
Labor leaders find justification in idleness and repudiate the biblical teaching that man must survive by the sweat of his brow. "Paradise Now" is the theme song, and Utopia is the goal.
The Push Button age makes us soft, and the Spartan ideal goes down the drain. Plush as we are, and plush we shall remain, and the Good Lord help the heathens who don't know about the better life.
Teaching guerrilla warfare to the South Americans, we have yet to demonstrate our own proficiency in Vietnam.
We have come a long way since the great discovery of 1492 and the landing of the Pilgrims in 1620, but Comfort and Leisure become our lodestars, and we overlook the fact that nations more stoic may find us ripe for the plucking.
We follow a piecemeal policy, and our criticism or our defense of policy also becomes piecemeal. Gerrymandering is a way of life and the construction of national jigsaw puzzles a popular pastime. With two great major parties which have responsibility for America, we become so submerged in petty jealousies that the best we can do is muddle through.
On the international front we select our friends and our enemies, and we move forward in an atmosphere that can be nothing less than foggy -- hoping that we have made the right judgments and that the bread cast on the waters will return a ten or a hundredfold. The national commitments are not always made known to the people until it is too late to withdraw.
The racial militants voice their threats to blow up the Pentagon or tear America down, and some men of the cloth, while deploring violence as psychologically impractical, set the stage for disruption in the cities. The rights and the responsibilities of the individual have been lost somewhere in the plethora of demagoguery.
Paying lip service -- and even more than that -- to the fight against communism, we find ourselves caught in the strong current of a society that in itself must eventually be socialistic, and the career people, the bureaucrats, can distort the best intentions of the President and the Congress.
A tax-collection service has been built up that can destroy the small man's right of economic survival, and if he protests he may find it more costly than acceptance of the inevitable.
Men speak out with little thought of the impact of their words, and they forget the adage that silence is golden -- at least on occasion. Pressed by representatives of the communications media, they have to say something, and if that something doesn't make sense, they can smooth it over tomorrow.
This is the bitter frustration that prevails in America today, and no man can hold up clean hands, because no man can take credit to himself for more than a selfish interest, whether he be a common laborer or a statesman. America with all its awesome responsibility must set a course in keeping with its greatness. Cloakroom politics should be relegated to the area of the obsolete, the limbo of history.
Never has there been greater opportunity for a nation to lead the world, and never has it been so imperiled by bickering and self-seeking and violence and -- above all -- pettiness. America is greater than this picture of conflict and confusion.