To the editor:

Recently I spent most of the day reading a book I’d been putting off reading for more than 50 years — Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl’s book is his first-hand account of life as a prisoner in Auschwitz.

I had resisted reading this book for so long even though I believed I should read it. There are mandatory shoulds and optional shoulds in life.

Interestingly, that’s exactly what Frankl explores. Despite starvation, sleeplessness, freezing cold, crowding, sadistic bullying, assault, typhoid, lice, hopelessness, the unending, deadening routine of intolerable pain, what could keep a person wanting to try to stay alive?

He discovered:

The question is not what do I want out of life but what does life want out of me?
The power of asking himself: Can I be worthy of this suffering?
That there are only two races: those who behave with decency toward others and those who don’t.
The power of the memory of the face of his beloved wife
Curiosity

I was glad I read this book. Things are getting bad for us in the United States, and because of us, things are getting worse the world over.

My husband and I are not yet threatened by the Revenge Tour contingent running the show. We are U.S. citizens. We have birth certificates and passports. We aren’t going to be flown without a habeas corpus hearing to a prison in El Salvador. We are retired, so we can’t be jacked around by DOGE apparatchik — fired, rehired, fired, and denigrated throughout. We aren’t going to be offered an ultimatum to sell out our integrity or fold.

Not yet, anyway. These cruelties have not yet reached us personally.

But recently I read a letter written by a professor from the university where I taught for 30 years, congratulating a colleague for being in the company of the greats, authors like Maya Angelou. His colleague’s book had just made it to the censored list at the Naval Academy, as one of the books deemed too threatening to the sensitivities of our manly cadets.

His letter brought on a wave of tears this morning. My parents are both buried in the Arlington National Cemetery. My father was a graduate of the Naval Academy, an active service officer during three wars, and my mother was a codes and ciphers officer in the WAVES during WWII.

I felt my parents reading the professor’s letter over my shoulder. I imagined them laughing and shouting and applauding with me from the open sky or from wherever they are now. Surely he and my Mom were up there now, cheering for this professor’s letter that clearly and defiantly calls out this defilement of the Naval Academy and of education, in general, and of the country and its freedoms that he’d spent most of his working life defending.

What is life asking of us? Which race of the two do we belong to? The ones who behave decently? Or the other ones, the ones who live for vengeance and power?

This month, as my husband and I stood among the folks holding our signs along U.S. Highway 101 at the Lincoln City “Hands Off” rally, I felt such affection for the humor and good faith and creativity and the easy-going, accepting, spaciousness of these sweet people. All of them strangers to us. All of them friends. When the two enormous shiny pickups gunned their engines and blew black exhaust on us as they drove by, the way these folks, in their decency, just shook it off calmly and carried on.

Yep. Victor Frankl would have approved.

— Donni Kennedy/Lincoln City