Letters page trauma inducing

Reading the comments on social media is a dangerous pastime. Just when you think society has won the race to the bottom, someone finds a new way to be horrible to others.

Reading the Penticton Herald letters page these days is almost as much of a trauma-inducing trudge to the bottom of propriety.

I suppose I just assumed there was still someone at the helm, cautiously steering the ship on that fine line between encouraging free speech and ensuring the lines weren’t crossed into hatred, bullying and untruth.

Letters pages, in past years, were carefully curated, always mindful of the responsibility of the publisher to responsible communication and to avoid unnecessary litigation. Apparently the Penticton Herald no longer cares what it puts on the page.

Saturday’s letters page featured correspondence from Paul Crossley, one of the page’s too-regular contributors, with the following line: “. . . it is time to dust off a couple of ‘Fatman’s’ and ‘Little Boys.’ ”

For those who don’t know, and I would encourage everyone to actually study history rather than just blindly repeating the mistakes of the past, “Fat Man” and “Little Boy” are the code names given to the first atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, respectively. Mr. Crossley is using code names as a thin veil to his exhortation to drop nuclear bombs on Afghanistan.

Hundreds of thousands of people died the last time nuclear bombs were used on a civilian population. Thirty-two million people live in Afghanistan, and just under five million people in the capital city alone. To allow a letters page to be used to encourage the slaughter of potentially millions of civilians is truly the newest low.

Yes, unfortunately we expect people to find new lows when it comes to being hateful and miserable to each other. For this new low to be dug by a once-venerated publication with more than a century in print is shameful, to say the least.

S. Paul Varga Former managing editor

Penticton Herald