An apology from George Mena

["McMARTIN, Robert" <rmcmarti -at- BAEA -dot- COM -dot- AU>]

I didn't write this, I'm merely passing it on for George.

An open letter and apology to all on Tech Whirl from George Mena.

> As I sit before my keyboard here at home, I do so to the full
> knowledge
> that rain is falling here in San Francisco at 7:45 am, Saturday,
> October
> 24, 1998.  I'm reminded of two things as the rain falls.  The first is
> how some of us would say "It's raining cats and dogs outside" to
> describe the weather.  The second is the weekly critiques I
> participated
>  I was on the staff of San Francisco State University's campus weekly,
> Phoenix, during the late 1970s.
>
>  our lead newspaper advisor (and working reporter for the San
> Francisco
> Examiner), typically led the critique.  In his critique, he would
> comment on literally every key phrase in every story in the paper to
> remind us just how important it was for us as student reporters to use
> the most accurate language possible in our stories if we were ever to
> become real reporters on daily newspapers one day.
>
> I can still hear him right now, 20 years after his critiques, making
> his
> editorial points.  "If it goes without saying in this article, then
> why
> say it at all?" he would say to us as he'd begin his critique.  "You
> say
> it's raining cats and dogs outside?," he'd ask us.  "If so, where are
> the bodies and why didn't I see them falling when I was standing
> outside
> in the rain waiting for the M line streetcar to show up? And how did
> cats and dogs, who don't have wings last time I looked, get that high
> up
> in the air to begin with, anyway?"
>
> What Lynn  and the rest of our instructors were encouraging us to do
> was
> become masters of the written word.  If we were to make our living as
> editors, reporters and writers, we had to be as clear and unambiguous
> in the verbage we used in our articles and in our copyediting.  We had
> to be clear to the average reader on the street, which decidedly had
> to
> include every student on campus as well as to any member of the
> general
> public who somehow wound up picking up a copy of Phoenix.
>
> What I now realize is that becoming -- and staying -- a master of the
> written word is an ongoing process.  It doesn't end after graduation,
> nor does it end when one starts earning a paycheck for what he or she
> is
> hired -- anywhere -- to write.
>
> In my response post to the anonymous poster on his "incident" that
> you've all now read -- and mostly hated -- I used inappropriate terms
> and phrases  without realizing it.  When I first read the post, I
> heard
> the sound of the poster's pain; his bitterness and bewilderment over
> what had happened to him at a job he was let go from.
>
>
> His words touched a part of my heart and soul that is, sadly, still
> very
> sensitive to even the slightest vibration.  This particular part of my
> heart and soul is, to this day, that sensitive because I am a physical
> abuse survivor whether I like it or not.  And I let his words strike
> my
> heart and soul with enough emotional force roughly equivalent to a
> 150-megaton nuclear event in the days when nuclear weapons testing was
> still permitted aboveground.
>
> The emotional fallout  from the retaliatory strike that  was launched
> against me for my poor choice of certain words and phrases has only
> today begun to subside in my heart.  Amazingly, it seems to have
> survived the force of the airbursts as the warheads detonated at their
> respective target altitudes for maximum effect.  And yet, magically, I
> have re-learned the key lesson that was imparted here.
>
> The lesson is that words can hurt.
>
> It does not matter if the words are spoken or written.
>
> Words can hurt.
>
> And I am supposed to be a master of the written word just like
> everyone
> else here.
>
> And I forgot this lesson.
>
> Words can hurt worse than being hit by a car (which has happened twice
> in my life before I reached my 8th birthday) and worse than having a
> line drive foul ball lined off my face (which happened to me in
> softball
> practice one day many years ago).  Used in conjunction with the naked,
> merciless force of my mother's wooden cane as she repeatedly beat my
> back and shoulders with it -- while she was aiming for my head --
> words
> can  hurt like hell.  At 5-9 and 220 lbs., she was a large woman who
> packed the wallop of a grown man.  And she used her brute force
> regularly on me and my brothers and sister whenever the house wasn't
> clean.  To this day, I still hate her for that.
>
> Here in the Bay Area, there used to be TV ads that addressed the power
> of words as a way of calling attention to the devastating power of
> words
> on children when used destructively  by their parents.  Today, I wish
> those ads would be rebroadcast on all television and radio stations on
> Planet Earth and never be allowed to stop being broadcast.
> Words can hurt.
>
> My words hurt the members of this list.
>
> They weren't meant to hurt anyone, but they did.
>
> ity for my poor choice of words.  I should have known better and
> thought
> I did when in fact I did not.
>
> I will do my best to do a better job of being a master of the written
> word,  especially on this list.
>
> I hope I've helped to start healing a wound that I also caused to all
> of
> you and to myself.
>
> Thank you for reading.
>
> George Mena
> ===========
>
> There it is, guys.  How do you feel?
>


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