Dear modern writers of open letters,

Hey there! It’s me, your sworn enemy. I wanted to drop you a line and check in. With the school year winding down, it’s been a little quiet on my newsfeed—the metaphorical ink has dried on the open letters you penned to your freshman year roommates/dorms/classes/libraries/cafes/that building you passed every Wednesday/guy from calc class you studied with once in November/your two weeks of eating vegan/the frat house where you thought you lost your student ID that one time but a brother gave it back to you later that week so it was just a funny misunderstanding/a tree on the quad you particularly liked/your mini-fridge and who knows what else, and I haven't been positively overwhelmed with inanity or triteness for, like, two days. Are you guys okay?

I just thought I’d ask, because since the rise of bastardized social-media-blog platforms like The Odyssey Online, everyone who has sufficient motor function to type on a keyboard thinks that their every waking thought is worth being trumpeted to the world. (You do get that that’s what an open letter is, right? A letter to be read by everyone?)

I’m not the first one to write along these lines, so I can hardly claim originality, but nonetheless I feel morally compelled to not stand idly by in the face of such endless, asinine word-spewing. If I may trouble you, dear Odyssey reader, with a moment of substance: the form of the open letter has a rather interesting and meaningful history. A piece in NPR places open letters as far back as the late 18th century. A published letter represents a curious intersection of public and private that wouldn't strike my generation as anything out of the ordinary—many of our lives are intertwined with this bizarre ritual of creating virtual shrines to ourselves in a common sphere where intrigued onlookers may visit and explore—but a letter, to recipient and from sender, is an inherently private form of discourse. For this closed line of communication to be intentionally blown open for the world to see, its content should meet a certain threshold of significance.

And indeed, historically, open letters have met that bar. In 1898, Emile Zola wrote an open letter entitled “J’accuse…!” addressed to the President of France, accusing the government of anti-Semitism in the case of the jailing of Jewish French military officer Alfred Dreyfus. Dreyfus was accused and convicted of treason because a suspicious document found in a German military officer’s wastebasket had handwriting that, according to penmanship experts, was too dissimilar to Dreyfus's own script. He was publicly stripped of his rank—military ribbons ceremoniously torn from his coat, sword broken in two—and sent to Devil’s Island, a penal colony off the coast of South America. Zola was convicted of libel two weeks after the publication of his defense of Dreyfus and fled to England to escape imprisonment, where he and several others continued to assert Dreyfus’s innocence until 1906, when Dreyfus’s guilty verdict was annulled in an appeal. Dreyfus was subsequently awarded the Cross of Légion d’honneur, as “a soldier who has endured an unparalleled martyrdom.” Now that’s an open letter.

In 1917, distinguished poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote an open letter to his commanding officer as “as an act of wilful [sic] defiance,” and refused to return to the trenches. Sassoon wrote this letter, which would later be titled “Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration,” because he felt that “the war upon which [he] entered as a war of defence [sic] and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest.” Copies of the letter were published in local newspapers, The London Times, and eventually, a copy was read out to the House of Commons. Do you think the United States Congress should hear your thoughts on your “almost” relationship, your former best friend, or, the most maudlin of the bunch, the one who took you for granted? (These were the top three search results for “Odyssey Online open letter to.” You can’t make this stuff up.)

“Okay Meredith,” I hear you seething. “Those letters you mentioned were written a century ago. Should we just live in the 20th century, then? Should there be no progress? Should we not use dishwashers or air conditioning or iPhones either? Should alcohol be illegal? Should women not vote?” Of course, that is not my point. The open letter does not deserve to live in the past and perish in the present. On the contrary, the open letter itself is an unbelievably effective agent of progress, of driving human civilization onward toward better things. The open letter is a public forum, accessible by anyone who can read or hear, for polished discourse between civic leaders, private citizens, business owners, community organizers, etc.—anyone who has something meaningful to add to the conversation.

One last poignant example comes to mind: Martin Luther King Jr.’s "Letter From a Birmingham Jail," written after his arrest in 1963. The letter is a response to another open letter written by eight Birmingham clergy members, criticizing the demonstrations and protests of the Birmingham campaign. The clergymen call the actions of King and his cohorts “unwise and untimely.”

I’ll let King speak for himself:

“We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait.’ But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky […]—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.”

The letter is long, eloquent, and bursting at the seams with pain and emotion and determination and meaning. Mimeographed (essentially, xeroxed) copies of the letter were circulated through Birmingham, it was published in several pamphlets and magazines, and the first half of the letter was brought before Congress by Representative William Fitts Ryan (D-NY) and published in the Congressional Record. How do you feel now about writing that open letter to girls with high standards?

By all means, the open letter should be used today; our world in 2016 presents many issues that would justify and benefit from it. The world has injustice and terror and all manner of horrific things that we could and should write about, especially considering how easy writing has become. But seldom few (like, limit-approaches-zero few) of the open letters I see written en masse by my generation concern Syrian refugees or Saudi Arabian human rights violations or even problems within the United States.

The barriers to publication are so low today, and in many ways, that's great. Anyone with access to the Internet, including groups previously marginalized by the publication process of a past era, can get their words out there into the ether. But attached to that giant window of opportunity is necessarily the absence of quality control. And since there’s no editor to tell you “no” anymore, I’m here to let you know how desperately I wish we would all think before we write.

This is not to say that nothing should be written for entertainment—many of my friends here have written hilarious, clever, and satirical pieces for this very publication. I also don't mean to condemn personal, emotional and sentimental writing. The open letter, however, given its history as a substantial and signifiant form of public expression, should be reserved for times when we have substantial and signifiant things to publicly express.

And why do I get to write an open letter? Well, either I fancy my message serious enough to actually warrant the use of the form, or I’m a hypocrite. I’ll get back to you on that.

I’m sure I’ll hear from you soon!

Scornfully yours,

Meredith xx