Dear Editor,

The column “Why it’s not surprising young men are abandoning college” by Kathleen Parker in Times Observer was disturbing. I reread it in order to look very carefully at what the author was actually saying about the slipping position of men’s power and esteem in our culture today.

As I listed on paper her facts and figures, I began to realize she was writing an essay of irony on the value our culture had placed on women for many centuries until the role reversal the author lamented on in her essay, gained ascendency a half century ago.

It is my fervent hope that some author will be able to comment in an essay a few centuries from now on how human beings have put aside their individual, gender, and race egos and are now forming collaborative partnerships to raise children to, as they themselves do, value the gift of coming into the world as a human who has the free will and the potential to act beyond gender, race and ego to accomplish the mandates handed down by the great religions we of this and past centuries claimed to be truths we professed to honor.

Pauline Steinmyer,

Warren