Accepting the world

I have become increasingly irritated by some of the whining bleats about curling newsprint, as though it were some kind of communicable and dangerous disease instead of a temporal inconvenience. To take seriously the significance of these whining complaints, one would have to have cultivated a hysterical level of super-sensitivity.

I spent several years as staff writer, then publisher at multiple newspapers. From that perspective and background, I think your company and staff do one helluva good job in the face of declining public interest, interference from social speciousness, trivial pursuits and other social dynamics inherent in a current social order addicted to amusement, temporal indulgence and instant gratification.

In late 1997, I happened in a bookstore onto a nonfiction book titled Megatrends by John Naisbitt. The author sensed a direction in America of self- delusion and shallow depth, a trend unlikely to change for a generation or more. After deliberating and reflecting on that, I called in my No. 2 son who was in business with me. I told him that we are not officially for sale, but if we got an inquiry, to not let the inquirer get away. I also told my one investor the direction I thought we should take, and he agreed.

My investor got a nice augmentation to his investment; so did I and my son had a trade that he was subsequently able to successfully market, as well as a nice financial bonus.

I am a lawyer by profession, not a moralist, a deacon or a professor. Readers, like publishers and lawyers, have to take the world as it is, not as they wish it were. Moreover, we all need to analyze our world as it is, not as we wish it were. BOYCE R. DAVIS

Lincoln