By Rosa Ostrom

This is a pretty cool opinion page, right? Cheers and sneers, a nice piece about translation… and a giant ad at the bottom. 

This page could be full of witty and thought provoking pieces that you and your peers have written. 

Why isn’t it?

Only one of you sent them in. For that one, we are truly grateful, but one piece does not an opinion page make.

This page tends to be much more interesting when there’s something more than a medieval-looking man pointing a finger at you, especially when you’ve already seen this man in at least six other issues of the newspaper.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you wrote a piece that people cared about enough that they wrote back to this section to talk about? Yes! Yes, it would!

One of the things that makes the opinion section so great is that you, the reader, get to have your thoughts and ideas shown. 

A much better alternative to interrupting your roommate while she’s doing her homework to tell her your ideas about the ways that the country needs to revamp the political system.

An outlet for that scathing retort you’ve been meaning to give us after reading that article that (you feel) we got all wrong.

We’re here, and we want your opinions. We want you to type them up in a succinct 600-700 word piece — or draw them up, in an amusing comic if you’re into that — and send it on over.

We’ll read it, copy edit it and almost always, print it.

If you don’t have the time for that, we understand. Sometimes it’s just easier to send a cheer or a sneer to us to voice that quick irritation and get it out into the world.

But when you find yourself griping for the ninth time about people who complain too much without doing anything about it, sit back, take a listen, and realize that you are that person. And then write to us.