Looking around the country with a blind, left eye? –Robert M. Shelby, 9-25-10.

In Sept. 23’s Letters, a gentleman with impressive resumé wrote of recent health trouble in his household followed by severe injuries to himself from a staircase fall. His readers can surely empathize as I do, having also known a share of painful mishaps. Hopefully, he’s medically insured. He goes on to give us an example of fallacious reasoning which is less impressive than his resumé but fully as painful to clear-headed people as a fall downstairs. He suggests to us that from old age and suffering come wisdom. Old age or suffering may allow opportunity for learning and insight but do not cause them. Age and pain offer no guarantees of wisdom. If they did, the human condition must clearly be better than it is. Old as our human race has become and much as we have suffered through history both from hard reality and still more from each other, mankind by now would have reached Utopia, right?

The gentleman invites us to suppose his painful time in recovery gave him elevation and deep perspective nigh unto epiphany! He looked over the nation’s economy and politics so astutely as to see for sure that President Barack Obama’s policies are driving us to bankruptcy through overspending and borrowing, that he is out of control and that our problems disappear by putting him out of office. The gentleman takes comfort and encouragement in finding some people agree with him. He must, then, find it vastly depressing to learn how wrong his views look to folks of wide sympathy, clear perception and sound reasoning. He ended with “New things are on the way!” He obviously meant “You’ll get the same, old stuff, again, only worse!”

Try this argument based on his premise?—The pain inflicted on Liberal feelings by this fellow’s antediluvian, almost Neanderthal organization of belief and attitude brings to Obama and us Progressives, through long suffering, a godlike clarity of vision, wise beyond Conservative’s ability to grasp or to tolerate if ever they sense it. Their thought processes and sympathies got stunted in shriveled assumptions. Simplism. Propertied egocentrism. Money-directed presumptuousness. Illiberality. Niagara-Up economy and low-wage slavery. Ripe for corporate, increasingly fascist World Order?

Closing item: Also in Sept. 23 Letters, Catherine Rich claims to have listed “45 reasons for supporting Carly Fiorina” and posted them on http://www.solanorepublicans.org. Looking through the site, her absurd rationalization nowhere appears, unless hidden from unregistered viewers in their closet Forum, shielded from open, honest debate.

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