Staying in Touch, and a Rant

Yesterday evening I pretty much finished off the Christmas letters that go out to my closest friends along with their Christmas cards. This is a major production.

Each year at this time, the Christmas cards begin to arrive, and probably a third of them will have a photocopied letter enclosed that details all the chatty news of the family for the past year. For the most part, though, I really don't care. I don't need to know that Aunt Tillie broke her hip, or that little Freddie won the "I didn't pick my nose as much" award at pre-school, or that someone took a vacation to sunny Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. While I always enjoy hearing from my friends, that's just more information than I really need or care about.

I think writing letters is a very personal and important thing. If you are going to spend enough time to write a letter to someone, it should be a letter that means something to the recipient, that contains the information you know that the recipient would want to hear and in which they'd be interested. And so each year at this time I write The Letter.

In the summer of 1979, I flew from Germany to Montgomery, Alabama, to attend the Air Force's Squadron Officers' School. As I stood there at the baggage carousel in Montgomery, jet-lagged and confused, I looked up and saw, on the other side of the traveling belt, a young woman my age who smiled and asked, "Are you here for SOS, too?" I think she recognized the haircut.

That lady's name was Toni, and that question began a long-distance friendship that has endured to the present day. The last time I saw Toni was at her wedding in about 1981, but each year at Christmas we exchange long letters that contain all the details of the past year. Toni wants to know everything, and I oblige at great length. This is The Letter, and becomes the baseline for all the other letters I'll send to my closest friends. Through the magic of word processing, The Letter is added to and subtracted from, topics are emphasized or de-emphasized, and pictures are added or deleted, based on what I know each recipient will want to know. That way, each of my friends will get a personalized letter, and I manage to save a lot of time and effort.

This year's Letter is the 28th that I've written to Toni. So far, she keeps writing back. Today, we would probably pass each other on the street without recognizing each other, but we've remained friends through the power of one chatty letter per year. And I like to think that all the other people who will receive variations on The Letter will appreciate the effort to tell them what they want to know, as opposed to sending them a one-size-fits-all letter stuffed into the card as an afterthought.

Letters are important, and writing them is a dying skill in an age of text-messaging, e-mails, and quick "let's do lunch sometime" phone calls. The time invested in writing a letter should lead to the joy involved in reading it. I like to think that my letters are like that.

Okay, now the rant ...

CNN is reporting this morning that the President of Sudan, the wise and gentle Omar el Bashir, has pardoned the British schoolteacher convicted by a Sudanese court of "insulting religion" and "inciting hatred" by allowing her elementary school students to name a teddy bear "Mohammed." Crowds of gentle, compassionate Muslims had demanded her execution, but marginally cooler heads finally seem to have prevailed. According to the CNN story, "The pardon came following efforts by Nazir Ahmed and Sayeeda Warsi, Muslim members of the House of Lords, to persuade the Sudanese government that releasing Gibbons would create international goodwill toward their country."

Yes, I'm sure that the international community is now brimming over with goodwill toward a violent, corrupt, and religiously intolerant government that has murdered hundreds of thousands of people in Darfur and still has enough time available to arrest and charge a schoolteacher with stupid religiously-based crimes. You can look - as I have - at the website of the Council on American-Islamic Relations for a condemnation of this travesty, but all you will find is one op-ed piece by a single American Muslim which offers a lengthy discussion of why the Sudanese government's action was "inappropriate." CAIR itself is far too busy accusing Americans of failing to understand the peaceful and compassionate nature of Islam to spend any time explaining to those same Americans how the condemnation of a gentle schoolteacher demonstrates that nature.

Inquiring minds want to know.

Have a good day. Write a letter to someone you care about. Or to someone to whom you need to give an earful.

More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo