Letter to the "Dispatch"

Some of us once thought our reactionary Columbus daily newspaper might have mellowed just a bit in the last few years. Well, the Dispatch is back!!

The Easter editorial admonishing Dublin students for wearing free speech T-shirts reeks:

“Distracting teachers and administrators from their important work is easy. Disrupting school is easy and initiating a free-speech argument is easiest of all . . . Putting school administrators in the middle of protests such as the one at Dublin Jerome is not an effective measure.”

Teachers and administrators who are distracted by students exercising their constitutional rights must have short attention spans. Moreover, it is the administrators who have put themselves, imposed their will, between the students and their rights.

But then, the defenders of the dominant status quo always blame their victims.

As for taking the easy way out, it’s much easier for the Dispatch to attack high school students – as it has several times of late – than attack the state legislature for refusing to follow the legitimate orders of our elected Supreme Court to correct unconstitutional school funding.

Thousands of hours and millions of dollars have been spent in just the way the Dispatch recommends: “educating themselves on the topic, joining the many organized groups that daily fight for causes, donating time and money to those causes and showing the grit to go door to door in their neighborhood, where selling band candy is easier than selling social change” to force the legislature to obey Ohio’s constitution and courts.

The Dispatch has yet to join the effort. Maybe it’s so easy only a child can do it .

Uke Man