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Letter to the Editor: Everybody else is doing it
Opinion
I was about 10 years old and I had just learned to cuss. I thought I would try out a dirty word on momma. So I said it right at her and the conversation at dinner stopped. Then my daddy hit my shoulder with a slow straight right and I knew I had crossed the "dad line.” “You don’t talk like that,” he said. “But everybody else is doing it,” I replied as I got off the floor. And then I got the standard “if everybody jumped off a cliff would you do that too.” I had jumped out of a pretty tall tree once so a cliff did not seem like such a big deal but I had enough sense not to say yes. I see in the news that a full grown senator of the United States did not have as much sense as I did at 10. He said, and I kid you not, that because the president set the tone of the nation we should expect others to be crude and mean. That senator still needs a more forceful dad.