Lofty thoughts, so little action

If I was President Obama I’d concentrate on getting rid of junk mail rather than changing the health-care system. At least with a junk mail initiative you’d be helping society use less paper. Help an elderly person with their health insurance paperwork and you’ll understand my point.

Taglines on e-mails are a common occurrence today. Like auto bumper stickers, people feel the need to create a warm fuzzy feeling or give me an unsolicited insight to their personality with a tagline which is usually too complicated to understand or too lofty to be realistic.

One guy I know has the tagline, “think twice about our environment before printing this email.” I’ve seen this one a few times but what’s ironic about this guy is he manages a very large accounting department which wastes more paper than credit card companies. The first thing his entire staff says when someone is looking for a past due invoice is “fax me another copy.” They never attempt to look for the original, which is probably buried in the stack of paper on someone’s desk. They also have a computer system which constantly sends duplicate faxes to vendors but no one fixes the problem.

Reminds me of the meth-head with a DARE bumper sticker on his car hoping it will save him from being pulled over.

So many of us have ideals we want to live up to but rarely take action on them, past having the simple, cerebral thought.

Ken Hopstad

Marysville