Yes, Mr. Pitts!
Yes, Mr. Pitts! (This was my original letter. See the way it was edited, below, then
my response.)
I’m glad the
Journal-World carries Leonard Pitts’ column. This Sunday, he and I agree that people
are too likely to choose “the soft comfort of lies” over the hard,
ugly truth. Pitts says the truth “indicts, it convicts, it rends and shreds
excuses, denials and the simple ability to live at peace with the
past.” The experiences of the
holocaust and the “tortured history of race” share a horrible
“rawness” which people tend to pass over, “spouting banal
platitudes.”
Hear me now, if you are
able. The holocaust has not ended
and the dehumanization of some of your fellow citizens has not stopped. Saline abortions, in which babies
are killed by injection of salt solutions which horribly burn their tender, unanesthetized skin, vacuum extraction abortions in which
babies are torn limb from limb out of the mother’s womb, and abortions in
which viable infants are pulled just out of the birth canal before they are
stabbed in the back of the head occur 1000+ times per day in this country.
When my children ask me
how my generation could have been so blind, so unwilling to face the grizzly
truth, so insistent that nothing bad was happening, and so mired in the web of
lies and self-interest that it could not extricate itself from the horror, I
want to be able to say I tried to expose it. So here’s your chance to face the
reality of your victims and stop the killing before your children realize what
you’ve done.
Here’s how the
Lawrence Journal-World editor changed it:
I’m glad the Journal-World carries Leonard Pitts’
column. This Sunday, he and I agree that people are too likely to choose
“the soft comfort of lies” over the hard, ugly truth. Pitts says
the truth “indicts, it convicts, it rends and shreds excuses, denials and
the simple ability to live at peace with the past.” The experiences of
the holocaust and the “tortured history of race” share a horrible
“rawness” which people tend to pass over, “spouting banal
platitudes.”
Hear me now, if you are able. The holocaust has not ended and the
dehumanization of some of your fellow citizens has not stopped. Saline
abortions, vacuum extraction abortions and abortions in which viable infants
are pulled just out of the birth canal occur more than 1,000 times per day in
this country.
When my children ask me how my generation could have been so
blind, so unwilling to face the grisly truth, so insistent that nothing bad was
happening and so mired in the web of lies and self-interest that it could not
extricate itself from the horror, I want to be able to say I tried to expose
it. So here’s your chance to face the reality of your victims and stop
the killing before your children realize what you’ve done.
Charlotte Ostermann,
And here’s how I responded:
Forty Words
If an editor catches my typo, that’s
editing. When he removes forty
words because they might inflame passion, ignite outrage,
expose truth, that’s censorship.
Last week I wrote that the holocaust still occurs when we dehumanize one
group of citizens in order to cauterize our consciences when we kill them for
our convenience. I agreed with
Leonard Pitts, Jr. that hard truth is hard to hear, but that we ourselves are
dehumanized if we will not bear up under the weight of it. Unfortunately, the J-W editors did not
consider their reading audience capable of bearing the weight of the following
words. I place them here in as
random and meaningless order as I can, so that there will be no risk to you in
reading them and so, hopefully, no more censorship.
horribly are before in which are mother’s
solutions killed head limb injection of burn in tender in which babies from
torn by skin limb womb they babies
their are unanesthetized stabbed the back salt of the
which out of the