Dear Libby

If I were to write a letter to a hypothetical advice columnist - let's call her "Dear Libby," after a fictional advice columnist on an old "Brady Bunch" episode - it would probably go something like this:

Dear Libby:

I live in a small town in New Jersey - Essex County, to be exact - and I have a neighbor with a very serious problem. He was recently offered a job in Washington interpreting the law of the land. It's a lucrative position. He'd get lifetime employment, with flexible hours and free parking. He'd have every summer off. The problem is, he's not right for the job and doesn't seem to know it.

The job he's been offered would require him to make decisions that would affect every man, woman, and child in America. But he doesn't seem to have the right mindset for it. When he applied for a job in Washington twenty years ago for an institution that at the time was run by a corrupt prosecutor from Oakland who called the American Civil Liberties Union "a criminals' lobby," he wrote on his application that he was opposed to the affirmative action policies that have allowed women and people of color to advance in major corporations and was devoted to eliminating them and apparently letting companies replace them with the "old-boy" networks of yore, the kind of mindless cronyism associated with the guy who gave him his current job offer. Also, he apparently declared that there is no constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy and that he would work to overturn the ruling from the very institution he now seeks to join that guarantees a woman's right to an abortion.

This gentleman seems to have some trouble regarding perspective. Although he's the son of an Italian immigrant, and although he's likely aware of the prejudice and bigotry Italian-Americans faced, he doesn't seem to realize that many Americans today - especially black people, who don't live in our neighborhood - still face bigotry and hatred and that his beliefs would encourage more of the same. He would make it harder for a black person to prove he or she was the victim of racial prejudice if he or she were passed over a job in favor of a white person. Even worse is his intimation that abortion could be made legal or illegal depending on what state a woman lives in, which would leave a lot of vulnerable, unmarried women unable to even control their own bodies.

In order to get this job, my neighbor would have to get the approval of a majority of the one hundred members of the directors' board responsible for ultimately hiring new people for this position. Some members of the board already support him wholeheartedly, but one of them is a chap from South Carolina who believes in banning gays and single mothers from teaching in public schools, and another board member who likely wants to give him the job is a bloke from Oklahoma who believes that abortionists should get the death penalty once the practice is outlawed. Not the kind of guys you'd want on your side. Many of the board members who would vote on my neighbor's current job application are either very nervous about him or are steadfastly opposed to him. Also, many of these same skittish board members - a fellow from New York, two nice women from California - are Jewish, so if he got the job, it would look like he got it only out of other people's anti-Semitism.

Don't get me wrong, he's a likable fellow - some would even call him a lovable goombah - but he's just not right for this job. So how do I go over to his house - whose location was revealed by my local newspaper and is theoretically available to the few black people who use my local library and could thus be the site of a rather heated demonstration by the Essex County (40% black) NAACP chapter in short order - and encourage him to withdraw himself from consideration for the job because it's just. . . not. . . worth it?

Sincerely,

Steve Q. Public

Personally, I doubt that even Ann Landers could have answered this one.