"Public opinion in this country is everything," according to Abraham Lincoln.

Old Abe would be proud and fascinated by one of the Greenville area's best kept open secrets. I refer to The Daily Reflector's online News Message Board, which is a place where citizens can post their opinions, read others' views, even engage in a healthy back-and-forth concerning what is best for their country or just share a joke or a link that they feel might be of interest.

Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan said, "Debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide open and that ... may well include vehement, caustic and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government or public officials."

He may well have been describing our message board, which is rarely boring. But out of roughly 200 registered screen names, there are only a couple dozen regular posters in our little "sandbox," as someone so aptly named it. So we not only have room for many, many voices, but could use the influx of new opinions.

So if you like to write or just have something to say, and own or have access to a computer, you really ought to check it out. Go to Reflector.com and under the Opinion section click on the News Message Board for an interesting way to spend some time. Read the links. You can blow an afternoon just following where they lead.

Thinking up a screen name is just one of the most fun parts.

Make a difference or just have fun. As Charles William Eliot (former president of Harvard) said, "In the modern world the intelligence of public opinion is the one indispensable condition of social progress."

MICHAEL HIGHSMITH

Greenville