An open letter on open letters
In the age of the internet, if you write an “open letter” and never get a response, does it count as an open letter or as just another of the billion blog posts written that day?
This past week there were two “open letters” of note published on the web. The first was addressed to anti-legalization crusading Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman. It drew a flurry of comments online and silence from the Senator’s office. Written by his college pal Norm Kent, the letter details the senator’s history as a pot head and asks him to please stop posing and start governing. Totally.
How about standing up and saying: “I, Norm Coleman, smoked pot in 1969″; that “I am not a gang member, a drug addict or a criminal.” [...] How about you looking back at your past and saying: “What I did was not so wrong and not so bad and not so hurtful that generations of Americans should still, decades later, be going to jail for smoking pot — nearly one million arrests for possession last year.” Can’t Norm Coleman come out of the closet in 2007 and say “These arrests are wrong…” How about standing up not only for who you are, but for who you were? How about it, Norm?
The second open letter was a Huffington Post to Barack Obama begging him to make a bold move. The author, Dan Carol, a political strategist and syndicated columnist, laid out a strategy through which Obama could win committed voter support by asking Americans to get involved directly in turning around the country. Carol’s plan for Obama pivots on a bold environmental program that would both save the planet and remake the U.S. economy through green R&D and manufacturing. Obama’s governmental program, Carol says, should be so audacious as to make irrelevant the wonky debates over CAFE standards and carbon caps that bore voters senseless.
…the answer lies in marrying a call to national service around energy efficiency and independence - getting young and old, union worker and apprentice, city and rural, black and brown and white, retrofitting a new America and busy creating the jobs and industries of tomorrow. This is hardly a new idea, but no one yet owns the idea in this campaign. To own it you need to bet big and go all in…
So where are the open responses?
