Letter to Kansas City Star

Before I have you read the letter I wrote to the Kansas City Star, as background information I'll provide the letter in the Star's Letters section that prompted me to write one myself.

"Trample the weak. Hurl the dead."

Is this the national slogan for the government of Myanmar? No, I saw this on a T-shirt while getting coffee on a quiet Johnson County morning. I might have forgotten this, except a man beside us in line commented about it. Smiling, repeating it to memorize it. How cool. The man in the T-shirt said his company gave it to him and he really did not think about it when he put it on.

These were not angry young men trying to shock, venting frustration at the world. No, these were middle-aged, normal Johnson Countians, running family errands, not thinking.

Normal people, who now cheerfully say compassion is not cool. "No mercy" has been made contemptibly clever.

We have freedom of speech here, and I will defend that freedom. But also, we have the freedom to think. If we do not think about what we say, even on a T-shirt, we are no different from the thugs running Myanmar.

Robert Cain
Overland Park

I have to wonder what kind of silly, black and white world Robert Cain (Letters, 5/31) lives in to honestly suggest that someone wearing a T-shirt with the slogan, "Trample the weak. Hurl the dead," (or repeating the slogan aloud) is on the same level of vileness as the "thugs" (as Cain so refers them) of the government of Burma.

To suggest that utilizing free speech in a way you do not agree with constitutes villianizing a person's character to such a putrid level is not only ludicrous but somewhat disgusting. Would Cain have us live in 1984 and institute thought police? Should we all love Big Brother? Perhaps this is an extremist view of Cain's thoughts-- but it illustrates the same kind of extremist view he applies to those who harmlessly repeat meaningless phrases.

Does Mr. Cain never swear? Never laugh at a horribly inappropriate joke? Has he never had lustful thoughts while with a significant other? Never enjoyed a PG-13 movie? I'm sure there is some moral principle Mr. Cain has broken. Does this make him "no better" than those "thugs" of Burma's government? In Mr. Cain's strictly black and white view of the world, yes. But in my view of the world, it just makes him human.