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Illiterate citizens seldom vote.

While ingenuity can sometimes help a man or woman to discern directions from familiar landmarks, buildings, cemeteries, churches, and the like, most illiterates are virtually immobilized.

We do know this: democracy is a mendacious term when used by those who are prepared to countenance forced exclusion of one third of our electorate.

One of the wisest of those Founding Fathers (one who may not have been most compassionate but surely was more prescient than some of his peers) recognized the special dangers that illiteracy would pose to basic equity in the political construction that he helped to shape.

A submerged sense of distrust becomes the corollary to a constant red to trust.

Illiteracy has many costs; few are so irreversible as this.

(Those, on the other hand, who cautiously refrain from "innovative" recipes in preparation of their children's meals must suffer the opprobrium of "laziness," "lack of imagination....")

Thus, to passivity, is added frequency — indeed, almost uninterrupted continuity.

They cannot observe preventive health care admonitions.

They do not want to humiliate their child or themselves.

Childbirth might seem to be the last inalienable right of any female citizen within a civilized society.

What greater violation of our biological, our biblical, our spiritual humanity could possibly exist than that which takes place nightly, perhaps hourly these days, within such overburdened and benighted institutions as the Boston City Hospital?

Unaware of their rights, incognizant of jargon, intimidated by the unfamiliar air of fear and atmosphere of ether that so many of us find oppressive in the confines even of the most attractive and expensive medical facilities, they have signed their names to documents they could not read and which nobody, in the hectic situation that prevails so often in those overcrowded hospitals that serve the urban poor, had even bothered to explain.

We do know this: democracy is a mendacious term when used by those who are prepared to countenance forced exclusion of one third of our electorate.

A child choking while his mother searches for a word she does not know to find assistance that will come too late.

Loss of interest on the check accounts they do not have, and could not manage if they did, must be regarded as another of the excess costs paid by the citizen who is excluded from the common instruments of commerce in a numerate society.