To the editor:

A recent letter to the editor lamenting the photo of a young deer hunter and his trophy has a point. By spotlighting hunters, the newspaper encourages participation in this controversial sport. But more readers’ sensibilities deserve protection: No more vicious football players stomping across prone bodies, please. Lawrence bar-crowd photos? With the damage alcohol does one’s brain and liver? Don’t we all find these offensive?

How about those farm kids who competitively raise animals to be butchered? Yuck. Pollution, resource scarcity, overpopulation, STDs, sex education? Stories encouraging pollution, consumption and sex. Could we drop political news, too? Broadcasting the shenanigans of our politicians only encourages them and makes me feel bad because, frankly, I get embarrassed for them. Don’t you? No economic or financial stuff, either; it’s sort of depressing.

Anyway, let’s eliminate those photos of kids with deer they’ve harvested. (Acknowledging kids who’ve enrolled in hunter safety courses to learn firearms safety, and who’ve spent hours in windswept treetops observing nature and developing patience and endurance in the achievement of a difficult goal seems OK to me, but that’s probably a personal whim that has no place in the disinterested editorial policy of a newspaper.)

Could you maybe quit publishing everything but the Sunday funnies? (Without Doonesbury?) You know, there’s probably something in my letter to curdle the milk on just about anyone’s breakfast Wheaties, so you’d better pitch it into the wastebasket. Please don’t publish this letter. Go on; throw it away. Sorry to waste your time … Never mind.

Tom Hoffman,
Lawrence