Wanted: Opinions(Including yours)

My favorite part of this page is the part that's missing today.

The heading over this particular section reads "Your Views" but usually we call it what most people call it, which is letters to the editor.

In expressing my affinity for those letters I don't intend to imply that I dislike the Opinion page's other components — the editorials and columns and cartoons.

I chuckle occasionally when Charley Reese lands a stiff blow on the collective jaw of the Israeli lobby, or when Cal Thomas impales some liberal on a clever phrase, or when a cheeky cartoonist discovers yet another way to lampoon President Bush's policy gaffes.

I keep reading, my curiosity unquenchable, in the still vain hope that Bill Press will compliment a conservative Republican without the agony of the gesture marring his prose as conspicuously as a pimple on the tip of a nose.

I suppose it's even conceivable, though I concede the odds are infinitesimal, that Reese will just once acknowledge the theoretical possibility of Robert E. Lee's fallibility.

In the meantime, though, I wait for letters to the editor.

I feel a tiny thrill whenever one appears in my e-mail folder, standing out amid the cavalcade of promises to enhance various parts of my anatomy — or at least send me to the Caribbean, unenhanced but with cash in my wallet.

I like it when I sift through my mail and find an envelope with "to the editor" handwritten across the paper.

I favor these letters because most of them are written by local people who felt compelled to comment about local matters.

And local matters are to the Baker City Herald what oxygen is to a deep-sea diver.

My goal is to make sure the Opinion page doesn't suffocate, as it were, for want of such letters.

To that end, I've done away with, at least temporarily, our longstanding rule that limits writers to one letter every 30 days.

Instead, we'll publish a letter from an individual writer every 15 days — provided, of course, that the letter complies with our other standards, including the 350-word limit.

The idea that underlies the 30-day limit is a solid one.

That rule is supposed to prevent the few people who possess a surplus of both time and opinions — but not necessarily of common sense — from dominating the page.

I think this is a worthwhile goal.

Nonetheless, I'm confident that allowing writers as many as 700 words on this page each month, rather than cutting them off at 350, will enrich readers by serving them a more generous helping of ideas from the people they share sidewalks and streets and grocery aisles with.

Or maybe you think my idea is ludicrous.

This is a perfectly acceptable topic for a letter to the editor.

Just remember to sign your name, please.

Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.