More than one wise person in my life has told me that I’ll never be able to please everyone. Heck, I can’t even please all cats (me, the so-called Cat Whisperer), so why would I think humans were any easier?

I wouldn’t. Cats tend to be much easier, especially if you have some bites of egg or chicken on you. I’m usually most offensive to cats when I cough or sneeze in their general vicinity, as it’s apparently a great insult to their ancestors (I apologize a lot when I cat-sit during allergy season), or I forget for a few hours to clean their litterbox (usually because I’m writing and/or editing for this job).

If only my critics (and those of other people at the paper) were as easily assuaged and could understand that I’m not all-powerful (I’m not even mid-powerful) and can only work with what I have.

What I have much of the time, just as with other newspapers across the country that aren’t nationwide, is a limited number and range of letters for the Voices page. So when someone complains about vitriol (well, that directed toward his preferred party; he has no problem with that directed to the left) on the page when I’ve so often pleaded for people at large to appeal to their better angels, saying that since I pick the letters there shouldn’t be anything that offends them, well … I have to remind that I’m, again, not all-powerful.

Oh, if only I were …

♀️ There’d be a lot fewer people placing the lives of all women (including trans women) in danger by, oh, let’s say claiming that an athlete born female who is competing in women’s boxing in the Olympics is actually a man. Considering that Imane Khelif’s country of Algeria is not exactly LGBTQ-friendly, she could be in real danger upon her return home (with an Olympic medal, no less, at least a bronze as of this writing), simply because she doesn’t fit some people’s image of a woman, despite being born and living as a female her entire life.

The International Boxing Association, which is heavily influenced by its Russian sponsors, had disqualified that boxer and another woman from its 2023 world championships, claiming they “pretended to be women” and “tried to deceive their colleagues,” according to Mother Jones. The tests that supposedly revealed XY chromosomes haven’t been clarified by the group. And it wouldn’t matter anyway, since women can have XY chromosomes and still be women (like those who have Swyer Syndrome).

Karolos Grohmann of Reuters reported that the International Olympic Committee, which no longer deals with the IBA, said the testing used was illegitimate and lacked credibility: “The IOC said the testing process at that event, which only came towards the end of the competition after the boxers had already fought several bouts, was completely arbitrary.

“‘Those tests are not legitimate tests. The tests themselves, the process of the tests, the ad hoc nature of the tests are not legitimate,’ IOC spokesperson Mark Adams told a press conference.

“‘The testing, the method of the testing, the idea of the testing which happened kind of overnight. None of it is legitimate and this does not deserve any response,’ Adams said.”

American non-binary Olympic athlete Nikki Hiltz commented on the controversy on their Instagram account: “Anti-trans rhetoric is anti-woman. These people aren’t ‘protecting women’s sports,’ they are enforcing rigid gender norms and anyone who doesn’t fit perfectly into those norms is targeted and vilified.”

Exactly. Not every woman is a Barbie doll, nor should she be. Those who think they should look and act a certain way need a reality check. As Hiltz wrote Tuesday, “Remember it cost $0 to be kind to those with different lived experiences than you.”

🧐 People would think before they spoke, wrote, or posted on social media. Words are powerful, especially in the hands of someone well-known, so when people like J.K. Rowling (whom I once admired) post things like her accusation about the Olympic boxer, it’s hard not to lose faith in humans as a species. Watching how low people will go to hurt others for no reason other than they don’t fit an image or believe as others do is disheartening, and not at all what I was taught as a child. And as a proud LGBTQ+ ally and aunt, it reminds me that people I love with my whole heart are often put in danger by unthinking people who care for nothing but the next rush that comes from hurting others.

It takes a lot of courage to be who you really are if it’s not what is expected of you. I’m just a boring old cis-het white woman who loves cats, is overweight, and occasionally funny, and I don’t care if you criticize me, but if you come after someone I love? You’d best be prepared for fierceness.

📝 I’d be able to keep people from making plurals with apostrophes, head off comma abuse, and make sure all people were writing to be understood.

So many times I’ve had to hold tight to the fist of death, because so many people post online without caring that they look illiterate and sloppy in their posts, then wonder why they can’t find a job. (I make mistakes in posts too, like not noticing my phone autocorrecting “ya” to “ta” [why???] in a Threads post the other day, but I usually fix it when I see it or otherwise amend the post because it will drive me nuts otherwise.

So please, stop putting hyphens after -ly adverbs (newly-elected will get you newly smacked upside your head), use spellcheck, stop putting spaces before punctuation, stop overusing capital letters and exclamation marks, do not put only an apostrophe behind a name ending in z or x to signify ownership (they get an apostrophe and an s: Cruz’s, Walz’s, Cox’s), and for the love of cat, use an -es if you’re talking about more than one of a family name that ends with s (Joneses, Harrises). There are more, but my eye’s starting to twitch, so I should stop.

🤖 I’d actually moderate everything that the trolls on the newspaper site think I do. Sure, I’m a chronic insomniac, but even if I didn’t sleep at all, I’d need about 48 hours in a day to do all the things some people think I do. Or be a cyborg.

Let’s see: I’ve had people think that I run the editorial page (nope, that’s my boss, the editorial page editor, David Barham), the Perspective section (that’s my colleague Karen Martin), the newsroom/syndication contracts/etc. (nope, that’s Managing Editor Alyson Hoge), the entire paper (definitely not, that’s our publisher, Eliza Hussman Gaines), moderate the website comments (don’t have the time or patience for that), as well as deliver their Sunday paper (I’m usually asleep when those are delivered by the paper’s carriers). I’m also apparently not smart enough to write what I do, so get all my content straight from the Democratic Party and am paid well for the privilege.

Yeah … no … if I were actually doing all those things and getting paid what I would deserve to be paid for doing them, I wouldn’t need to house/cat-sit on the side to take care of medical and other expenses, and I’d definitely live in a much better house than the Crap Shack.

✍️ There would be more letters to the editor coming in every day that didn’t insult specific other readers (public figures and amorphous groups don’t apply, within reason); go on and on about things that have been proved fraudulent, especially without citing sources; use form letters or plagiarism (citing sources applies to more than just fraudulent claims; don’t try to pass off someone else’s work as your own); didn’t rehash imagined slights from other readers or politicians not even relevant now; weren’t the same writers ignoring the 30-day cooling-off period (seriously, stop sending letters every day; you get one per 30-day period, and that’s it); and weren’t just the same talking points over and over.

You know I’m no fan of politics, but that doesn’t mean politics is verboten in letters; heck, we’d be lucky to have one letter a day if that were the case. The plain fact is that not as many people write letters to the editor anymore, and some newspapers have even begun eliminating them (the Bellingham Herald in Washington, for example, calls them “a thing of the past” and “too difficult to verify and generally rife with misinformation,” according to the Post Alley blog). For now, anyway, we plan to keep running letters, but readers have to remember that Voices can only work with what it gets. We get more liberal to center-right letters than very conservative ones, and more of them tend to be written in a way that they can pass fact-checks with little trouble. I would absolutely love to get more letters, period, but more letters from conservative readers would be wonderful.

Alas, many of the old reliable conservative letter-writers have passed on, like Karl Kimball of Little Rock, with whom I often corresponded about all sorts of matters (he was a nice old guy who was very conservative on most things). I saw someone on the website, after complaining about the dearth of hard-right conservative letters, say that the reason those people didn’t write letters was because they’d be preaching to the choir in Arkansas.

Sure, if that’s what you want to believe, but if you don’t write in, complaining that people of your stripe aren’t being printed, well … I think I see a flaw in the logic. Just sayin’.

But ya know, none of this matters in the big picture because someone will always find a way to be offended. Some seem to even think that the right to be offended is in the Bill of Rights. But c’mon, it has to be exhausting to always find offense. In. Every. Single. Little. Thing.

If you want to complain, feel free; it’s your right. However, that doesn’t then mean no one can complain about what you said or did. That’s the thing about living here in the U.S., where we are all entitled to the same rights … and oops, there’s no right to be free from criticism.

Sorry ’bout that.