As I often do when I’m back in Danville, Kentucky with nothing else to do, I scour the opinion pages of the local newspaper, The Advocate Messenger.  I often find blatantly ridiculous, short-sighted letters to the editor, as they’re not hard to find in a small, rural, almost neo-conservative town.  Yesterday I found a gem of a letter, written by a Centre College student, in which he was responding to an editorial piece written by a Centre College professor about the downfalls of capitalism on the American economy.  The student’s letter to the editor was entitled “Capitalism works for U.S.,” which was all I had to read in order to determine how ignorant it would be.  Yet, I still took the time to read the letter, which failed to prove me wrong.

Here is a link to the original column by the professor, entitled “Do the rich deserve their wealth?”:

http://www.amnews.com/public_html/?module=displaystory&story_id=42155&format=html

Here is the student’s letter in response:

Dear Editor,

To begin, I agree with professor Brian Cooney that Scandinavia is a wonderful and prosperous part of the world. Also, the women there are very beautiful and wonderfully friendly (I miss you Wilda). Professor Cooney is kind enough to give us a couple columns of facts and figures that remind us of the evils of capitalism and the plight of the common American man.

I only have two facts. More than 300 million men, women and children are free due to our corrupt system. And our crazy pyramid scheme of an economy, the largest in the world, is valued at just north of $13 trillion. Life here is tough.

I also agree with the good doctor that the hard-working people of our nation could probably be dealt a better hand. Who couldn’t? I do not think that it is the place of a college professor that holds a position at America’s finest private college, Centre College, to extol the virtues of manual labor.

According to professor Cooney, the only kind of effort that deserves compensation is that which requires a strong back and a sweaty brow. By that logic, the wise philosophy professor should surrender his “undeserved” salary to the nearest man or woman who looks like they have actually experienced a hard day of manual labor.

I very much enjoy and deeply respect the professors I have been lucky enough to have at Centre. I also defend the worth of their time and their salaries. Just the same, I think corporate executives deserve their salaries, since they sign most everyone’s checks, keep companies profitable and donate to private institutions of higher learning.

In closing, I suggest everyone disregard Cooney’s call for the international proletariat to rise up and seize the means of production from the capitalist class. Communism never really made it past a generation or two. People get tired of waiting in line for bread.

If you get a chance to read the professor’s original column, you will surely realize just how ridiculous this letter is.  The mere fact that he labels the professor’s views as communism is proof his of utter stupidity and ignorance.  And if he truly views a college professor on the same level as a corporate capitalist, then he really has no idea what capitalism is.  The fact that he uses the figure of the American economy being worth over $13 trillion to prove that life isn’t tough in America is ludicrous.  I won’t even get into him labeling Centre College, which I daresay isn’t even the best college in Kentucky, as “America’s finest private college.”

Anyway, I wrote a short letter to the editor in response.  I will attach it at the end of this post.  Letters like this one that I found leave no mystery as to why people from Kentucky (and similar states) are viewed as ignorant hicks by the rest of the world.

Here’s the letter I wrote (the one in the newspaper is a bit shorter because of the 350 word limit):

Dear Editor,
I can understand where Mr. Griffin is coming from and I can somewhat empathize with the candor of his arguments, however I must dissent on some of the points that were made.  First of all, I believe that he and I have very different definitions of freedom and prosperity.  He states: “more than 300 million men, women and children are free due to our corrupt system.”  What exactly is his definition of freedom?  Are these people free because they are guaranteed certain freedoms in the Bill of Rights?  Are they free because they are free from the confines of slavery?  Alexander Berkman once defined freedom as simply as ”the opportunity to satisfy your needs and wants.”  By this definition, there are many people who are not free because they are dependent on their employers and their wage salaries, which cannot adequately satisfy these needs and wants.  They are essentially “wage slaves,” confined to the bottom of the economic pyramid, unable to ascend much higher due to the monopolized capitalist system we know so well.
Morgan seems to imply that life is prosperous in America because the economy is “valued at just north of $13 trillion.”  While this would certainly seem sensible upon first glance, most American citizens know better than this.  Sure, life is lavish and sumptuous among the top 5 to 10 percent of Americans, but the exact opposite is true for the bottom 30 to 40 percent.  Professor Cooney said it himself; the richest 10 percent of U.S. households own almost 72 percent of the nation?s private wealth, leaving the other 90 percent of Americans to fight over the remaining 28 percent.  Do the advantages that these select few people have been blessed with make them deserving of such an overwhelming majority of the country?s wealth?  Perhaps Morgan believes so, but I can assure him that the families that are forced to live on minimum wages, those who cannot afford health care, acceptable housing, viable transportation, or even conceptualize sending their kids to college, I can assure him that they would respectfully disagree.
I am ever amazed at America’s eagerness to shoot down criticisms of capitalism and label them as communism, as Mr. Griffin chose to do in the closing of his letter.  One would never know that the Red Scare ended decades ago.  Perhaps my lack of an education from “America’s finest private college” has left me ill-prepared to read between the lines, for I must have missed the “call for the international proletariat to rise up and seize the means of production from the capitalist class” in Dr. Cooney’s column.  I fail to see how the thought of improving America?s economy to benefit all of its citizens is a direct attack on the democracy that was originally designed for just that purpose.  After all, the country was founded upon the proletariat’s desire to escape the oppression of a system that benefited only the elite.

Dan Bodner