В День левшей редакция газеты напечатала выпуск с зеркальным текстом, чтобы показать неудобства, с которыми сталкиваются люди с такой рукой

Ask around this newsroom long enough and eventually someone tells you about Richard Ballantine’s prank. Ballantine – chair of Ballantine Communications Inc. and of the Herald’s editorial board – is a leftie with a reputation for whimsy. It was his idea, Aug. 13, 2024, to run a special edition of the paper flipped for left-handed readers. One woman bought a copy, got as far as noticing something was off, and came right back to ask for “the right-sided paper” – before she’d read a word of it. It’s a small demonstration of what left-handed people navigate every day: a world built for someone else’s hands. This newsroom isn’t the first place in Colorado where a leftie has left a mark that outlasted the joke. Left Hand Canyon, northwest of Boulder, and the town of Niwot are both named for Niwot – Arapaho for “Left Hand” – the 19th-century Southern Arapaho leader who spent his final years trying to broker peace between his people and gold-rush settlers. In November 1864, he was killed at the Sand Creek Massacre – the violence he had spent years trying to prevent. His name likely referred to nothing more than which hand he favored. It has outlasted him on our maps for more than 150 years. Thursday, Aug. 13 is International Left Handers Day, marking a trait about 1 in 10 of us carry. There’s no single “lefty gene” – twin studies put heritability around 25%, spread across dozens of genes rather than concentrated in one. What’s striking is that many of those genes don’t just shape the brain; they help build the body’s entire left-right axis before birth, the same pathway that puts the heart on the left. Hand preference traces back to a decision the embryo made before it had much of a brain to decide anything with. None of this has been academic for generations of left-handed kids. Well into the 1960s and ’70s, American schoolchildren were routinely forced to switch hands – this newspaper interviewed a Durango reader two years ago who still remembered his hand tied to his desk in a 1960s Catholic school (Herald, Aug. 13, 2024). It wasn’t a harmless correction; the practice is linked to higher rates of stuttering and dyslexia in those who went through it. What the trait doesn’t do, unlike almost everything else these days, is sort by political tribe. Five of the last eight U.S. presidents have been left-handed – Barack Obama and Bill Clinton on one side of the aisle, Ronald Reagan, both Bushes and John McCain on the other. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a lefty. So was Rand Paul. Even Bart Simpson doesn’t map onto anything political – creator Matt Groening, a fellow lefty, simply drew him with the hand he uses. So how do you actually mark a day built around a trait you may not have? Solidarity doesn’t have to be complicated. Declare your kitchen, classroom or office a “Lefty Zone” for the day, and do everything with your left hand instead – stir the pot, pour the coffee, cut the bread, sign your name. Ninety seconds of that explains, better than any editorial can, why a leftie eyes a pair of scissors, a can opener or a spiral notebook with suspicion. Or keep it smaller: shake a hand left-handed today, ask the leftie in your life what actually trips them up, or just tell them happy Left Handers Day. Niwot didn’t get to see whether the peace he worked for would hold. But his name is still on the land, attached to a trait that turns out to be one of the few things in American life that genuinely refuses to split down the middle. For one day, stand with the other 10% – and let them have it without a fight.