Billboard’s message more important than image

I was disappointed to see Casey Seiler’s column “Painful, powerful and fake,” Dec. 25. I decided to look past it until the next day a larger editorial hammered readers yet again with the moral stance we should be taking “Stronger than fiction,” Dec. 26. There is a real problem depicted in the billboard in question: drunken driving and I find it hard to concern myself with the 100 percent verifiability of the billboard.

Would it have been less of a problem for Seiler and the Times Union Editorial Board if the billboard did not name a specific child and, by default, a specific incident and instead referred to “he (or she) will never know...”? Because I am sure with no trouble at all the Shaker High School students who created the billboard could have found a real child to give a name to. There might be questions then raised about the crudeness of intruding on a particular family’s grief.

I empathize with newspeople who have been vilified as being enemies of the state in recent years when the truth does not agree with a particular politician’s narrative but to bring Alex Jones, and his attacks on the veracity of the Sandy Hook parents, and the subsequent effect on their lives into the argument seems to be over the top. These things do happen, as in December 2012, right here in the Capital Region. That storyline could read, “They will never see another Christmas.”

I would applaud any efforts to stigmatize a very real issue, not take two days (and counting?) to cast shadows on it.

Charles Greiner

Malta