Rick Olson, Indianola

Letter to the Editor

Steve King refuses to acquiesce to the Register’s daily browbeating homilies and altar calls insisting that all males fully adopt their prescribed attitude of contrition and shame. Consider Rekha Basu’s July 24 column blasting Steve King’s recent comments [How non-Western, non-Christians paved way for King], Western Civilization is, indeed, the invention of white males.

Of course, no one believes it sprang from white males instantly and fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. New inventions and ideas are built on previous ones.

Given her background, it is not surprising that Basu would take pride in the remarkable Indus Valley civilizations of the third millennium B.C. Yet it took the fiat of white male governors in the 1830s to put an end to the widespread practice of suttee in India.

Never have people with power and privilege been so generous with them as have white males. Suffragettes marched and carried signs, but it was white males who gave them the vote. When we think about the outrage of Negro slavery, we must think of the millions of white males who left their homes and marched into the jaws of death singing, “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free!”

— Rick Olson, Indianola