Sir: This morning I was driving through the Tubes when I happened to glance at the car to my left as it passed me (at quite a high rate of speed, I might add, which occasioned some squealing of brakes a few yards down), and what I noticed, specifically, was the license plate, which was one of those specialty plates on which the driver had chosen the letters to spell out something that indicated to the world his sense of what was vitally important in life. Specifically, the plate spelled out this slogan:

DRV FSTR

I was really delighted to see that someone cared deeply enough about my own favorite charity to specify a license plate with that slogan. In today’s world of rapid suburbanization, many droves of cattle have been left homeless, and drove fostering is more vital than ever. Nor should we forget the benefits for the fostererers. I mean the people doing the fostering. Cattle can be very affectionate animals, and of course, alternatively, they can be delicious. Either way, opening your pasture to a foster drove of homeless cattle can be a rewarding and indeed life-changing experience. I am absolutely sure about the life-changing part.

So I ask your readers, Won’t you please consider giving pasture space to a homeless drove of cattle today? And to that driver I saw in the Tubes this morning: I should like to offer you my sincere thanks for spreading the word about the homeless-cattle problem to all the morning commuters around you. But you might want to slow down a bit. You drive like a maniac.

—Sincerely, Albertina Cuyp, Dormont.

Sir: Isn’t it awful how oppressed people are oppressed? I think all the oppressors in the world should wake up, see the damage they’re causing, and stop oppressing people. But here’s my problem. I wanted to tell the oppressors exactly that, but I couldn’t find any oppressors. All I could find was a bunch of oppressed people. I talked to some people who sure looked like oppressors to me, but they assured me that they were actually the oppressed. The poor were oppressed by the rich, but the rich people I talked to were oppressed by poor people who wanted the government to take more taxes from them. The members of privileged majorities were oppressed by minorities demanding equal rights. Everywhere I looked, the powerless were oppressed by the powerful, but the powerful were also oppressed by the powerless somehow.

So I’m writing to tell you that I have discovered clear evidence of alien life forms on our planet. The proof is simple. Everyone agrees that a whole lot of oppressing is going on, but no human being is doing the oppressing. Therefore the culprits must be life forms beyond our knowledge and understanding. Or cats. I wouldn’t put anything past cats. —Sincerely, Barnsworth W. Kriegsrumtopf, Swisshelm Park.

Sir: As I’ve been walking around the city these last few weeks, I’ve certainly been noticing a lot of pink. Skyscrapers are lit up pink. Fountains are running pink. I thought at first I might have pinkeye, but my opthamolo— my optphomalo— my eye doctor says that’s not how pinkeye works. And she was wearing pink, too, and she had her office decorated in pink.

So clearly a lot of money has been spent this month on making things pink that are normally not pink. And that started me thinking: Suppose we all decided to make a little sacrifice to make the world a better place. Suppose we took all that money we spent on making skyscrapers and stadiums pink, and put it to some good use. Think of what we could accomplish! I was thinking, merely as a suggestion, that we could put it into research to find a cure for breast cancer. Maybe we could wear little pink ribbons to let the world know we’ve donated our pink money to breast cancer this year, and maybe we could put out pink yard signs and shine pink floodlights on our… No, wait, I think I’ve got stuck in a loop here. Forget everything back to the ribbons. But, yeah, research to end breast cancer—that would be a good way to use the money we’ve been spending on pinking things up. Or maybe research to find a cure for conjunctivitis. —Sincerely, Le Promeneur solitaire.

Sir: One of the candidates for governor in our Commonwealth has threatened to ban Pole dancing in schools if he is elected. This is yet another example of senseless discrimination against Polish-Americans, and yet another reason to vote Monarchist on election day. Poles may be the ones suffering now, but do not be so naive as to suppose that the Lithuanians will not be next. —Sincerely, Montgomery “Krakow Mack” MacWhortle, Shadow Minister for Education, Grand Duchy of Pennsylvania.

Sir: Why do you have a letters column, anyway? No one has time to read letters anymore, let alone write them. Open a Twitter account like everybody else, you lazy bum. —Sincerely, Parag Agrawal.

Sir: I take metaphorical pen in metaphorical hand to protest against the hidebound traditionalism of your publication. Every other magazine in the world dares to be different. Yours alone is the same. If you will not show some courage and stand up and be different like everybody else, I shall be forced to denounce you to my Norwegian elkhound Harald, who takes a very dim view of such things. —Sincerely, The Man at the Dog Park Yelling Into His Smartphone.

Sir: I read some time ago that our federal government plans to end hunger in the United States. This is a laudable ambition, but it is doomed to failure unless it addresses the one ruling cause of all hunger in our country. I speak, of course, of a lack of education. We can never eliminate hunger until the poor are properly educated. They must be taught the truth: that the only sure cure for hunger is food. If they ate food, they would not be hungry.

My complete plan for the reform of education in the poor neighborhoods has been forwarded to the Department of Education, with a carbon copy to the Department of Health and Human Services. (By the way, your readers might find it useful to know that carbon paper is still manufactured in Mexico.) Since it is 723 pages long, I shall only summarize the salient points here.

In the first stage, the poor are to be taught how to identify food. They will learn a visual system of identification (see the accompanying illustration), as my early experiments in teaching the poor to distinguish the edible from the inedible by taste led to some unfortunate results.

In the second stage, the poor are to be taught how to eat. The use of proper silverware is to be stressed, with a strong emphasis on the long-term advantages of sterling over inferior silver plate.

In the third and final stage, the poor are to become the teachers themselves, since it is a well-known educational principle that learning is best reinforced by teaching the lesson to others. The poor are therefore to be taught how to instruct their servants to prepare nutritious and palatable meals using exclusively food ingredients.

Naturally the full proposal is somewhat more nuanced, but I hope I have made the main points clear. Ending hunger is simply a matter of providing proper education to the hungry. Seen in this light, the problem becomes manageable, and if my own small contribution has been of service to my country, I shall accept that knowledge as the highest reward a true patriot could ask.

—Sincerely, J. Collingsby Popover III, Sewickley Heights.

Sir: In reference to the letter from Hezekiah Pure of the Cohort of Decency complaining about “inappropriately dressed women” at the Convention Center during the Mattress Sales Professionals’ Convention last weekend, I am sorry to say that Mr. Pure has entirely misunderstood the situation. Those women were all hired prostitutes, and were dressed according to the most rigorously proper standards for their profession. In the future it would pay Mr. Pure to investigate a little further rather than rely on his mistaken assumptions. —Sincerely, Hank Banks, General Sec’y, Middle Atlantic Association of Mattress Sales Professionals.