One of the best places to measure the pulse of the civically engaged is the letter to the editor section of the newspaper. It’s usually the first place I turn when I get the paper in the morning (I admit that I occasionally turn to the horoscope section next–but just for fun.)
Letters can be the most superb pieces of writing you’ll ever read, but they can also be incomprehensible and borderline paranoid. What makes letters often more thoughtful and interesting than online comments is the stipulation that writers must attach their names and cities to their submissions.
As you can imagine, people in Salt Lake City feel differently about key issues like marriage equality than do people in Provo. But there are also outliers. Those outliers provide an opportunity for remembering that even though political issues are so readily bifurcated into liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican, there exists a broad spectrum on the various issues Utah is currently facing.
Below are my picks for this week’s best letters, one from the Deseret News and one from the Salt Lake Tribune. My selection criteria isn’t overly scientific. In fact, I mainly selected them because I liked them. But that usually means that the letter was pithy, unique and forced me to think differently about a given issue.
From the Salt Lake Tribune, Salt Lake City resident Lee Kreutzer wrote in to remind readers that the Federal Government consists of hundreds of thousands of workers who also happen to be our neighbors. But where she really exercises her brilliance is in her clever turn of the well received “I’m a Mormon” campaign.
From the Deseret News, Gerald Elias of Salt Lake City takes issue with an editorial by Gov. Herbert’s energy adviser.
Elias argues that an energy boom likely won’t be in the state’s best interests, but he really catches his stride in his closing sentence with this artfully crafted turn of phrase:
What was your favorite letter from this week’s newspapers? Post it in the comments below.
