Revisiting 'nanny,' with a mea culpa

The Daily Inter Lake

An astute reader noted in a letter to the editor recently that this column is written on deadline.

Such, of course, is the nature of journalism. As the English poet Matthew Arnold once said, "Journalism is literature in a hurry."

But that is no excuse for getting things wrong, so newspapers have something that literature doesn't have - a corrections box that usually appears on Page 2.

That takes care of factual errors which sneak into stories from time to time, but there is usually no way to correct a mistaken impression, or to apologize for something which might have been worded insensitively.

On the other hand, since I have a column, I do have the opportunity to reflect on such matters, and to make apologies or corrections as necessary.

I find it necessary to do so now as a result of something I wrote in this space two weeks ago. The column in question was about watching the "Today" show one morning and being exasperated by what the news stories on the show revealed about the state of our nation.

I provided several examples of stories that exposed the growing influence of "nanny government" in our lives, which is to say the kind of government that people depend on to take care of their every need. One particular example involved the efforts of some blind people to force the government to provide paper money for them in a shape or form that allows them to differentiate the various denominations.

I did not go into any detail on this issue, spending just three sentences on it, so there was no room for discussion of the pros and cons of altering money for the sake of the blind. But of course, there are pros and cons. Even a representative of the National Federation of the Blind said recently, "it really is distracting" to have a lawsuit trying to force a change in American currency when there are much more important problems facing the blind.

Nonetheless, I left myself open for criticism by including the following line in my brief discussion of the currency issue: "People really do expect the government to do everything for them to make them feel better about their miserable lives, no matter what the cost or what the actual benefit."

This was intended to reflect upon all of us in modern America who think the government should take care of us from birth to death, down to and including protecting us from the Big Mac. It was not meant to reflect on the blind as somehow more miserable than the rest of us, but there it was in black and white, and it bothered several readers enough for them to write to me.

So I want to apologize to the blind or anyone else who thought I was singling out this remarkable group of disabled people for criticism. Anyone who has read about the achievements and accomplishments of the blind through the years can only be inspired by their example, rather than feel pity.

Unfortunately, my inartful wording drew attention to the blind in a way that was not intended. I do not think the blind as a group are more miserable than the rest of us, but rather see this lawsuit as one more example of how miserable our whole society is, and how demanding we are that someone take care of us and make our lives easier, no matter what the cost.

In the future, I will try to make sure that my deadline does not cause me to be insensitive to the impact of my words. On the other hand, I also pledge to continue to point a light in dark corners of our society and see what false premises scurry there, unspoken and unchallenged.

All of us need to be sensitive, but we also need to be vigilant.