Open Sesame

A lot of things that people do seem useless. I understand why they do them, and I even do them myself. Even so, I can see the probably futile or even counterproductive results of them in the making. One thing that has cropped up quite a bit lately is that passive-aggressive epistle, the open letter. It's a singularly impotent gesture, isn't it? I could see the purpose of writing and disseminating one if the intended recipient were actually unreachable. I myself penned one because there seemed no way of actually tracking down the one with whom I would have corresponded, so it seems that there is some purpose to it if done correctly.

Too often however, I see open letters to people who are eminently reachable, and it strikes me that the grievance being aired (and a grievance is always the object of such letters) just might get resolved if the letter were actually sent to the person being addressed and not to one's friends on a social networking website. As it is, people who care for the letter writer wonder in exasperation at their thinking. I know I do in any case. It really is a shame, and I think that technology may be partly at fault for beginning the trend of of making functional the person unable to confront.