Your new Our Lives writers did not get off to a very good start with the condescending column ("A trip through the outer limits," Nov. 30) by Patricia Wigington. On her way to her home somewhere near Garner she finds only "empty eyed folks" and "sad souls" who are immune to the foul odor of a chicken feed factory, people who live in "trailers" that remind her of "tin subs" or in "a huge monstrosity of a house" or in a "cookie cutter subdivision." Presumably this is her idea of the Old South since she notes that the "New South" is bulldozing its way through to replace what she finds so pathetic and distasteful.
Real people live in those trailers, cookie-cutter houses and the monstrosity house, and some of them read The N&O and must surely take offense at the way she has characterized them.
Ann Howe
