Dear Editor:

This is the third time in which I have had to chime in with a letter regarding a Salon article about if women should "opt in" or "opt out" with regard to the working/childcare question. Once again, the issue is framed as if he primary consideration for most families is one of the woman's personal choice and spiritual needs. Once more the children and men who are also intricately and intimately involved in such decisions, not to mention economic considerations, are ignored as if they have no voice and as if the woman's personal decision has no implications beyond her own sense of well being.

The most obvious fallacy behind this puedo-discourse is that men are always capable of supporting their families, especially their wives, in a style in which they are accustomed. For the majority of families in our country today, true economic security and well-being require that, at worse, both parents work. Ironically, this is particullarly true when children, whose presence add a great deal of expense to the family budget, come into the world. For those who would like to "opt out," and wish it as an option for all women, regardles of socioeconomic status, I would suggest that they focus on other issues such as raising wages for everyone, the expense of healthcare, the expense of housing in good areas with good schools etc. That way, it might be possible for most American families to live comfortably on the wages of one job or salary. They should also turn their critical wrath upon a society which values only work and in which one's occupation is the primary source of one's identity and in which other forms of finding one's self and/or human existence are unrecognized and ignored, such as full-time motherhood.

As I wrote in my previous letters, there is something very narcassistic in this discussion. The archetype women who exist in this discourse, prodded on by well-compensated career intellectuals who usually also have even high-salaried husbands, does not at all think about the toil of work, especially when it involves supporting other people, takes on her husband. This debate needs to include issues involving husbands and men. When the woman "opts out," what is its effect on the nature of a man's work? Will he have to take more demanding and higher paying jobs? Does he feel as if he is under more pressure? Does he really find "furfillment" is doing that? Thus, this discussion is completely effemoral without some sort of critique of the American work culture and what negative effects it might have on the family and on the psychological well being of the man himself. The "opt outers" never take that into consideration because for them, the man exists objectified and voiceless, as a husband who by definition exists in an predefined and involuntarily assigned role in wich he works to support her and her children and must make whatever sacrifice is necessary to accomplish that. This completely ignores the fact that many men feel that they are wasting their lives away because they have to support their families.

Rather than merely publishing my letters on their website, I suggest that your e-periodical investigate these above-discussed tangents.

Sincerely yours,

Arthur C. Hurwitz

To the Editor:

Benn's article is based on emotional and visceral criterion. The Clinton and the present Bush Administrations had very different policies toward the Arab-Israeli conflict and yet, in the words of Benn, "both turned out to be among the friendliest presidents ever to Israel." This means that "friendliest" in Benn's mind has little to do with what he considers the more appropriate U.S. foreign policy towards Israel's interests.

The bottom line is that either McCain or Obama would have a foreign policy which guarantees Israel's security militarily and considers its right to exist as a state an unnegotiatable given. The real distinction is not the U.S.' "friendliness," but rather what the actual U.S. foreign policy towards Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict will be: a continuation of the "hands off" and disasterous policy of the Bush administration of the past seven years, or a return to the traditional U.S. foreign policy towards the Arab-Israeli conflict in which the U.S. manages direct negotiations with the various parties which, at best lead to peace agreements, and at worse, contain the esculation of the violence to limit deaths and prevent the widening of the conflict.

Sincerely yours,

Arthur C. Hurwitz