Letters

The Editor, Sir:

I suppose I just don't get most of Carolyn Cooper's ideas. For me, they're seldom well thought-out and, worse, there's an arrogance, a pretence at wisdom and knowledge in many of them that smacks of personal inexperience and vanity. That sort of thing may well please and entertain the simple-minded and the gullible, and she is no doubt certainly popular as a contributor, but it offends the secure, the well rounded and the well educated.

In this past Sunday's wanderings, for example, it was hard to know where it was all going as she took on the notion of people who laugh at other people's religions. I have no experience with that at all. It seems more likely the notion that it must have come from something in her head than something she saw in the world around her.

Exceptionally tolerant

Generally speaking, I don't think people make fun of other people's beliefs and certainly not for the reasons she suggested. I've always thought Jamaicans in particular were exceptionally tolerant of various faiths. Emotions, passion, reason - honestly what does all that fluff and fancy have to do with religious intolerance?

Let me give you a simple example: When I was a boy, a beloved pet cat was run over in the street by one of the neighbourhood's local alcoholics one afternoon as he came home from the bar. I cried and picked up the poor animal, while a young friend of mine came riding along on his bicycle, saw it, and laughed. I looked at him in disbelief. Why was he laughing? Well, he simply didn't know any better. He hadn't learned to weep at the loss of something loved, nor sympathise with someone who had.

As such, I learned that our understanding of things we have no real experience with is always very limited. The same seems true of a lot of what Ms Cooper writes.

Like a speaker who likes to play with words and ideas as if they were just so much boring rice and peas, she seems to be worried more about the sauce than the substance, about saying something that sounds good rather than something that means anything or even much at all.

I am. etc.,

ED MCCOY

mmhobo48@juno.com

Florida, USA