The benefit of hindsight.

The February 1 letter to the editor headlined "Breaking With the Past" is nothing more than bitterness dressed up as self-righteous social activism, and the attack on past members of our organization demonstrates narrow-minded parochialism. How easy it is to look back at the past and to condemn the shortcomings of those who have come before us.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can scrutinize all of our ancestors under our high-powered moral microscopes and probe them for the faults we presume we do not share. Not only can we disgrace the names of those lawyers and judges who swore allegiance to the Florida Constitution of 1885, but we can condemn the legislators who enacted it and all of the voters who ratified it. Let's find the names of the men and women who taught at our segregated schools, the men who worked at the segregated police and fire departments, the women who worked as waitresses at the segregated lunch counters. Let's search through the property records to find the names of the families who lived in segregated neighborhoods. Let's hold all of them up to public ridicule and condemn them for not rising up against a system of discrimination that looks so clearly wrong to all of us today.

How mercilessly will our descendants scrutinize us? Will they look to see who swore allegiance to constitutions that protect the sacred right to abort babies and practice homosexual sodomy; that prevent schoolchildren from publicly saying a prayer but allow protesters to publicly burn the American flag; that allow the government to take land from the poor for the benefit of the wealthy; and, of course, that permit racial and ethnic discrimination as long as they're promoted with kind-sounding words and phrases like "affirmative action" and "diversity." All of these things seem innocent enough to us today, but then again, so did segregation to many Southerners half a century ago.

Hopefully, future members of The Florida Bar will be charitable to early 21st century lawyers who clung blindly to doublestandards.

Quentin B. Fairchild

Ft. Myers