Letter to the Editor: Columnist needs reality check

Dear Editor

I read Ms. Jamie Stiehm’s “The Founding Fathers’ trouble with women” commentary forward and backward. It didn’t make good sense in either direction. A better title would be “Ms. Stiehm’s trouble with reality.” 

She has assembled a litany of facts, which in the greater context of human history, are trivial and irrelevant. Civilizations, cultures, and the people they consist of evolve and grow over time. A brief glance at the history of the West validates this, but the details are a discussion for another day. The United States of America is an example of this evolutionary process. When first founded slavery existed in the Southern states, until the conservatives and churches of the North had their way in a bloody war and erased the cursed behavior of the Democrats in the South. Likewise great strides were made to wipe out segregation in the South (where the Democrats still reigned) by the Republican president Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s. There are many more examples, but these make the point.

When our Founding Fathers laid the foundation for our society, it was far from perfect. When Thomas Jefferson wrote those words “All men are created equal . . .” he said things that had not been said before and needed to be said. He gave our nation a goal to aspire to and we have been doing that ever since. The people we are today is not the people we were then.

This brings us to the terrible flaw in Ms. Stiehm’s critique. First, she is damning the current status quo, based on who we were, not who we are. All of us can look into our childhoods and see an abundance of questionable behavior. Using Ms. Stiehm’s logic, at the very best her childhood would be considered “childish and immature”. So, by her own standards, as an adult she is hopeless, childish, immature and suitable for institutionalization.

There is a phrase in the Bible, “When I was a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man I put the ways of childhood behind me.” There are various interpretations with the one I prefer being: We grow, in the beginning we were children today we are adults. We move forward in life as adults, not as children. That same chapter ends with, “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

My suggestion is that Ms. Stiehm fills her life with more love. Love of herself, her family, friends, community, and this wonderful United States of America that has given her the opportunities in life she has. You should not journey through life dwelling on the past, cursing earlier behavior that no longer exist. This will hinder you and fill your life with misery.

Scott Ramey
Downey