How do I write better than Dr. Sanity; Hugh Hewitt; MarK Steyn; Christopher Hitchens; George Will; Thomas Sowell or even Charles Krauthammer? I can't.

So the Query is how to write so that everyday people will understand what the issues of today are really all about?

To write simply or as Bill O'Reilly says "pithy". It is an unfortunate facet of my personality that I find being pithy the most difficult. Why? There are so many more underlying issues that contribute to any one point of view that unless one tries to dig deeper into the writer's intent, we get lost.

We may agree, disagree or remain neutral. Our depth of agreement or disagreement is often based on the filters we see and hear through and these filters come from not only who and what we are, but how we came to be who and what we are. From prebirth, in our genetic makeup are predispositions. Disease is one, mental ability and health another. But what dictates our ability to be "blind" when circumstances with which we disagree make us hate? We face the nature vs. nurture condundrum.

Who did we come from? Not just our parents, but our grandparents and back through time. All of these, I believe, have something to do with who and what we become. Dr. Sanity says "we are born narcissists". That is true. We care only that we are fed, kept dry, warm and and allowed to do whatever we want. True? Not so! We must first and last be loved and know that we are. As many of the babies during the Viet Nam War proved, just feeding, being kept dry and warm was not enough. There was no love in the equaltion. Too many, too few. So many babies parished.

Are grown ups any different? Perhaps only in the ability to sustain life without love. A sort of "little death" with air to breath and minimal attention to other physical needs. Something more than a "little death", it seems to me, inhabits those who hate. They are capable of attaining or maintaining whatever in their world is necessary to keep them alive, including the one most malevent emotion: hate. They can prosper, life long, enjoy the comforts they have or have not earned. But hate keeps them alive in a way that gives them meaning, they think.

Take George Clooney as an example. Good looking with a little boy smirk. But what is he really? What make George, George? Where and why did the hate come from? Why do we only now hear his point of view? He has been on this planet over forty years, so why now, why him? His contemporaries have given him a power to speak his hate and not be reviled. But where was George before his success on the small screen? He is not a great actor, director, writer. So what made him so virulent in his passionate hate?

George Clooney has the good fortune to "make it" in his world in this time. Whether earned or not is immaterial. He is a childish man. A womanizing man. A disrespectul man. And, he does not have the necessary ability to see himself as "those out of his mainstream". Why?

Factoid

I wonder what people would answer if I asked: what has killed more Americans, war or the automobile? The answer is truly astonishing and says a great deal about us as Americans: since 1775, about 1 million people have perished from wars; and an astounding 2.5 million in automobile accidents.*

One of the most astounding aspects of this question and answer if that it took wars 210 years and it took the automobile only 92 years!

Now ask yourself how many people have been killed in the previous century because of despots throughout the world and the answer would be close to 200 million people. The aforementioned figure is an approximate one because it is impossible to know exactly how many people were actually done away with just in the Soviet Union under the Bolsheviks and then Stalin; in China under Mao not to mention numerous countries all around America.

But, more importantly, these figures don't apply to living people. So, how many people do you think live in gross conditions all around the world? I would guess close to 5 billion! For these human beings, nothing has changed in hundreds, possibly thousands of years.

Another question: why does the left in the world believe that the only way to help is to allow a totalitarian government to rule? Why does the left ignore the plight of people in the rest of the world when despots rule?


*Initial question attributed to Marilyn Vos Savant in Parade Magazine published March 4, 2006.