Thursday, October 13, 2011

Winston-Salem Journal LTE's TH 10/13/11

Risk
Over the past few days, two events have been a major part of the national news. One has been the Occupy Wall Street, "businesses are bad" protests — the other has been the death of Apple's Steven Jobs. These two events are related by the differing views of success and failure they represent.
A couple of years ago, I said to an employee, "The freedom to fail is needed to have the freedom to succeed." He, like many of the Wall Street protestors, disagreed. The entirety of Steven Jobs' life demonstrates what all who attain greatness understand; success comes only when failure is risked.
The Wall Street protestors confuse equality of opportunity with equality of outcomes. The first, opportunity, is within the scope of government. The second, the outcome, as demonstrated so well by Jobs, resides with the individual. The organized unions now supporting the protests understand what most of the protestors do not: With the opportunity for these protests to fail is also an opportunity to succeed in achieving their objectives.
The protestors ignore that the success of Steven Jobs, Wall Street, the unions and themselves is only possible when failure is risked.

BARRY M. COLE
Kernersville
American protest
Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain condemns the Occupy Wall Street protesters as "un-American." Apparently, Cain misread American history. To protest is as American as apple pie. The nation was born out of protest against King George III of England. Remember the Boston Tea Party?
Cain should know better than others that without the persistent protests of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, Cain wouldn't be able to vote today, much less run for president of the United States. Most political, economic and societal changes are the result of mass protest movements: women's voting rights, the 40-hour work week, abolition of child labor, etc. They are the fruit of protest actions by women and laborers.
Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor labeled the Occupy Wall Street protesters as "mobs." They are citizens exercising their First Amendment rights to stage a peaceful protest against the greed of the fat cats of Wall Street, social and economic injustice and inequality, unemployment, losing their houses and a bleak future. They become a "mob" only when the police flex their muscle, as we have seen on the TV screen.
When the radical right tea-partiers protested at Washington in 2009, Eric Cantor loudly praised them for fighting for liberty. What a hypocrite he is. I wish he would keep his mouth shut, open his eyes and ears to see and listen to what the protesters say at Wall Street and hundred of cities across the country.

BOON T. LEE
Winston-Salem
Global communication
Everyone is talking about the tragedy of Steve Jobs and how he changed the face of global communication, movies and music. There is no question that Steve Jobs was a great man with a brilliant mind, but he didn't change my world. I've known no world without his products.
My first computer was a Mac; my current computer is a Mac. I used to download my music to my iPod; now I download to my iPhone, and I want an iPad for Christmas. So thank you, Steve Jobs, for all of my essential life tools.
What I want to know is this: Can I credit Steve Jobs for changing the global communication of adults toward teens?
"What are those things in your ears?" Um, duh.
"How does that iHome sound — as good as speakers with woofers and tweeters?" What does a woofer have to do with how I tweet?
"Will you just call me?" I'd rather text from my iPhone.
My parents and their friends have done a pretty good job of learning the technology created and introduced by Steve Jobs, but for my friends and I, well, it's just second nature. It makes me wonder what my kids will be saying when I'm my parents' age.

BESSIE ROSE WOLTZ
JUNIOR, R.J. REYNOLDS HIGH SCHOOL
Winston-Salem
No commission members
As a recently resigned former member of the Winston-Salem Human Relations Commission, I was disappointed that I could not find the name of even one current or recent commission member signed to the Equality Winston-Salem ad supporting "an open and inclusive Winston-Salem/Forsyth County" ("Pride Winston-Salem 2011," Oct. 9) in the Journal.
I suspect that, as was the case with me, no one asked commission members to participate. Unfortunately for us all, this failure only serves to underscore how insignificant, irrelevant and invisible the commission is to everyday Winston-Salemites. If true, why have a commission at all?

GUY M. BLYNN
Winston-Salem

18 comments:

  1. LTE #1.... So Barry: How did you get the scoop on what "all who attain greatness understand"?
    Which one told you?

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  2. Barely buried and conservatives are already doing their best to channel the memory of Steve Jobs to their political cause, a man who slept in the Lincoln Bedroom during the Clinton Administration......

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  3. The irony is striking on many levels.

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  4. Boon T. Lee......thanks for your monthly liberal letter. I don't know how we'd do without it.

    Noboby seems to know exactly why the Wall St. protesters are protesting, not even themselves. I call that 'nitwitted' or 'idiotic'.

    See.....conservatives can name call too.

    ______________

    Rush/KittyKat/Idiot/Nitwit.......you're an idiot. I call you an idiot as often as I can.

    An idiot, dolt, or dullard is a mentally deficient person, or someone who acts in a self-defeating or significantly counterproductive way.

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  5. Arthur, how goes the job hunt? Is there any way of combining your education backgrounds into a business for yourself?

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  6. Miss Woltz...a very nice letter on your part. Who knows what the technology of the future will be. But one thing that is "low tech" and will govern your near future as well as your children's future: a question--I have to support HOW many elderly baby boomers??

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  7. Boon Lee....we are watching and listening to the OWS protesters. They are becoming quite clear and predictable. These folks are hampered by many illogics but at least one is clear for now: Washington is grotesquely corrupt and insufficiently powerful, all at the same time. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss"..."won't get fooled again". Yes you will.

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  8. LTE #1 & #2 – I am delighted to see young people out and about doing something other than texting and playing computer games. They are really no threat to anyone, because they still have to learn that any protest movement must have a very sharp focus, as did the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and the recent peaceful revolution in Egypt.

    Those criticizing them are the usual suspects, angry old white men who do nothing for the community, just sit on their fat asses and whine.

    The USA tends to be a very self-satisfied nation, happy with the status quo until jolted out of lethargy by a protest movement. Had there been no abolitionists, we might still have slavery even today. In 1850, two young Wesleyan missionaries came to Salem, NC and were run out of town. Their offence? Handing out copies of the Bill of Rights to slaves. They returned and were arrested and put on trial. One was freed, but the other was sentenced to receive 20 lashes, stand in the pillory for one hour and spend one year in the county jail, almost unheard of at the time.

    North Carolina in 1715 set up a heavy fine and a period of servitude for any white woman who married a Negro. It also provided a 50-pound fine to the clergyman who officiated. Note that this applied only to women. Men could do as they wished.

    But after the civil war North Carolina and all other southern states passed laws forbidding interracial marriage of any kind. It took a hundred years of steady protest to get the US Supreme Court to accept a case against these laws. Citing the 14th Amendment, the court abolished all such laws.

    As Bob Dylan sang “Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall…
    Your old road is
    Rapidly agin'
    Please get out of the new one
    If you can't lend your hand
    For the times they are a-changin'.”

    Change is what has made and kept the USA great. We have never needed positive change more than we do right now. So turn off your computer and hit the streets.

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  9. OT.....these kids don't have any decent music.

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  10. I'll be willing to bet anyone that even after 200 years, men going after the backend of another man still won't be considered normal.

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  11. True...don't know how you protest without Joan Baez strumming in the background, not to mention the Stones for more energetic moments like fending off Bull Conners' attack dogs.

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  12. For that matter, interracial marriages are still the exception and regarded by many as abnormal.

    So much for Rush's/KittyKat's/Nitwit's/Idiot's anaylsis of aberrant behavior.

    Rush you're an idiot.

    An idiot, dolt, or dullard is a mentally deficient person, or someone who acts in a self-defeating or significantly counterproductive way.

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  13. Sophomore Year, UNC,1975, A classmate and I did a summer internship with Pan Am,NYC. We spent the summer and wrote their organization manual. Rolling Stones: Tour of the Americas '75, the band's first outing with guitarist Ron Wood, included six consecutive shows at The Garden - no nights off, lot's of days off though. :)

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  14. How amusing...a troll who is obsessed with bad ends and banging bucks offering opinions on what is and what is not "normal".

    Reminds me of the woman who used to live next door when I was a kid. That was her favorite phrase: "Well, that's just not normal." So how normal is eavesdropping on party-line phone conversations, her favorite pastime.

    I guess all busybodies think alike. Bucky want a cracker!

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  15. Good afternoon folks!
    LTE 1: I don't believe the protesters disagree with the concept of "freedom to fail". They are protesting that Wall Street did fail, but they (the middle class) are paying the penalty as if they had failed and not Wall Street. The risk of failure for Wall Street has been removed and placed on the rest of us.
    LTE 2:"To protest is as American as apple pie." - Couldn't agree more. History has shown that a "let them eat cake" attitude by those who govern does not work too well.
    LTE 3: Thanks Miss Woltz for making the rest of us feel really old ;). My first computer was an 8088 model with no hard drive and no mouse. It had 2 floppy disk drives with one being reserved for the OS disk. You can thank Jobs, his buddy Steve Wozniak, Gates, Allen, the Xerox lab, Hewlett and Packard, William Shockley and a host of others for changing how we communicate today. Jobs' gift wasn't in inventing. It was in recognizing the potential of something that already existed, (whether in production or just in development) then bringing that potential into existence as a marketable product.
    LTE 4: Shouldn't your energy be directed towards getting people to the polls on primary day next year to vote no instead of venting about not having your name on some newspaper ad?

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  16. WW, I think about doing freelance document digitization and management for law firms sometimes. It's a last option though...I'd need to do a lot of homework first, and I'd have to start small. And I have a risk-averse personality.

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  17. "For that matter, interracial marriages are still the exception and regarded by many as abnormal."

    Yes. And many people are morons. To quote George Carlin: "Think about how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of them are dumber than that."

    "History has shown that a "let them eat cake" attitude by those who govern does not work too well."

    Absolutely. Ask Louis XVI or Nicholas II how well that worked for them.

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  18. I have said all along that the Republican race for president would provide great comedy.

    Did Herman Cain get his 9-9-9 tax code from Sim City 4? Some think so.

    Others say that it comes from Sin City. Michelle Bachmann pointed out that if you turn 999 upside down, you get 666, which isn't quite true. You have to ROTATE it 180 degrees to get 666. Either way, Bachmann says it is the sign of the beast, so I guess Cain is the anti-Christ. Cain has no comment.

    Of course, Bachmann and Perry will be raptured next week, and then the fun will really begin as the field is left to the two anti-christ contenders.

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