Letters to the Editor: A “short brown’ Oaxacan was Mexico’s greatest president. What say you, Nury Martinez?
Why is it that everyone who writes to a newspaper on the side doesn’t seem to have two hands? Or two feet?
There is no point to being a “writer,” says Lourdes Reyes, who writes a column on the side for the Las Cruces Sun-News. If she wants to do anything, she says, she’ll just “work.”
That just doesn’t ring true. If anything, she said, “I write to be part of the paper.” But what does she write? A list of items: “A short list of things to do next week,” “A few reminders we’ve forgotten,” “Some jokes” — “Just that.”
Her letter ends up full of cliches: “Sew a button on a shirt. Get a haircut. Get a haircut.”
It’s pathetic that she’s been in the newspaper business for “40 years” and never knows how to write. She should know better — as she should know everything. Why, for example, does she know her hair must “get a haircut”? What does she know that she doesn’t?
It’s like the other day when her hair was cut short and she said to her mother: “But I’m so skinny, mother. I’m not going to have a hair cut.”
Her mother answered: “But you’re a girl; you’ll need a haircut.”
Then she did a double take. “Mother, did I say that?”
So there.
When this column appeared, she told me she intended to write it, but it just wasn’t happening.
“I was bored. I couldn’t think of anything to say,” she said. She said she’d “wanted to write” before. “But it’s not working like this. I just don’t have anything to say.”
Her “work” is just collecting money.
“When I go down there and interview somebody,
