Rant #3,046: The Letter

To start off, yesterday was a bit better day than the previous days have been for myself and my family.

Most importantly, I was able to resolve my mom’s credit card situation.

The credit card company took the errant charge off of her account, referred it to their fraud division. and will be sending us a new card within the next several days.

And then, kind of unbeknownst to me, but kind of not, I had a letter to the editor published in the local Newsday newspaper.

I have had many letters, and made many appearances, in the pages of Newsday since the early 1970s.

I used to be mentioned in the late Marvin Kitman’s TV column here and there during the 1970s, and I wrote several letters that were published over the past 50 years or so.

And as you know, I have been profiled a couple of times by the newspaper related to my work situation.

But this letter that was published was something a little bit different, and short and to the point.

It dealt with recent talk that the matter of “stress” among students should be accepted as a valid excuse for a day off from school, which I think is a ludicrous proposal, opening up a virtual Pandora’s Box of trouble if this measure is accepted.

Parents already have the latitude to keep their kids out of school for a variety of reasons, legitimate and otherwise … as long as “Johnny doesn’t feel good, so he won’t be in school today” is accepted as a valid reason for not attending school, then parents really can write anything they want to keep their kids out of school, and nobody would know the better of it.

But once a kid is allowed to say, “I can’t go to school because I am stressed out,” and that is accepted as a viable absence, you are really not helping the kid, and you are also putting the parent in a very awkward position.

Yes, stress is handled differently by everyone, but what an excuse that would have been if it had been available during my own school days!

And it also sets a very bad precedent for the future.

School is one thing, but the work world is another.

If such an excuse is accepted in school, would the same excuse be accepted by an employer?

“I can’t come in to work today because I am stressed out” somehow seems to be a hollow excuse when you are an employee being paid to work at your job.

I am sure that the employer would bend over backwards to accommodate such an excuse, but time is money, and what might be OK in school is not OK in the workplace.

We coddle our kids too much as it is, which only serves to smother their development..

We have all gone to school, and to work, when we were not at the top of our game, but somehow, we got over it and moved on.

My son has an acknowledged mental disability, yet during his schooling and his work experience, he has missed a scant amount of days due to sickness.

What excuse does a disability-less, but lazy, teenager have to miss school using the “stress” reasoning?

It is insipid that people are even considering this move on Long Island, and it is an idea that should be put in the wastepaper basket, where handwritten notes attesting to a “stress” reasoning for Johnny being out of school should also be tossed.

If this measure goes through, we are setting a very bad precedent … will the next acceptable excuse finally be “my dog ate my homework?” Will that finally be an accepted excuse for laziness?

Getting back to whether I knew my letter was going to be published or not, I kind of figured my letter would be published because I was called a few nights back and told that the newspaper was considering using my letter—which I emailed to Newsday—and they wanted to know what town I lived in, which I verbally provided them during that call.

So it took a few days, but I became a star for a day with this letter, one that honestly, few see because newspaper readership is not where it once was.

It is also online, but I know it’s not the same as getting a letter published in the 1970s, when just about every family and person read the newspaper.

But I will take it for what it was, a lifter of my spirits for a few moments in time.

Now, again, I have to return to the real world, and I have a lot to do to lift my spirits with everything going on around me.

Like we were taught in school on days we were stressed and not stressed, “The pen is mightier than the sword,” and in this case, I certainly proved that to be true, as my writing once again helped to lift me up, even if for only a scant moment.