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Vote if We're Pompous and Self-Important

December 8, 1998

Reading my own editorials on these pages, I feel that each is fine if taken by itself (we're expected to hold a charitable opinion of our own work). But taken in total--and I've written 37 editorials in the past year or so--I think that even my own mother would have to find me pompous and self important.

So let me defend myself to my mother this way--

When was the last time you saw a "Letter to the Editor" printed in Plating & Surface Finishing, Metal Finishing, Products Finishing, or another journal serving our industry? Contrariwise, when was the last time you saw a newspaper that lacked a vibrant "Letters to the Editor" page? Or any magazine (I don't care if we're talking Time, People, Smithsonian, Road & Track or TV Guide ) that lacked controversial letters to the editor?

 

Just as we do our country no favor by declining to vote and just letting things settle themselves as they may, we do our fellow finishers and fellow citizens no favor by honoring some vow of silence. While it's fine to cast a ballot for officers of our local AESF branch, the mechanism by which we really vote on industry directions is by publicly expressing our opinions.

 

I hold no office in our industry and can offer no special insight, so I don't want to pompously and self-importantly write the majority of the editorial comment for this whole darned industry. But our industry desperately, desperately, needs publicly expressed opinion. So write a letter to the editor of any of our trade journals, or for publication at an industry website, or --please-- for publication right here. Are we okay on this, Mom?

Dear Reader: please choose what you want to do--

 

I want to reply to or follow-up on this subject.

 

I want to start a new news item or editorial thread on a different subject.

 

I want to view the previous editorials and news items.