Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 180 Editor's Choice: 13
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Well, Now That You're Back
[Read the article: How Lebanon rescued me]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In the country where women's rights were invented, enabling you to become a lawyer, among other things, maybe you can show a little appreciation for that along with your valid criticism of our current foreign policy. You can get involved in the politics of this country in a way that will try to change that policy, which must be changed, rather than dangling above it and presuming that your identity somehow specially exempts you from the responsibility we all share: of fostering and loving and fighting hard for what is so extraordinarily good about America that your parents, like my grandparents, sought shelter here. You tell a beautiful story about Lebanon: why muck it up with casual (and irrational -- you live here too) racism toward "America," which you define in ways that would enrage you if it were directed at Lebanon?
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A Little Confused About the Forum
[Read the article: How Lebanon rescued me]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]OK, maybe I'm missing something. But in a forum where people, anonymously, quote heroes waxing eloquent about not forgoing danger in the interest of "a little temporary safety," and other slam participants in particularly personal ways while listing themselves as "No Name Given," what exactly is the point of expressing any opinion at all? Look, this is a comments column in Salon magazine. We're the only people reading it, and there aren't as many of us as attend your average freshman survey course. So why on earth would you be such a coward that you couldn't even say your own name here, of all places? Astonishing.
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Get Over Yourselves
[Read the article: The media's love affair with dead white women]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The media's interest in an infinitesimal number of the pretty white women who experience horrific deaths is not overweening concern but creepy fetish. Your sanctimonious "righting" of this situation is no less creepy and every bit as racist as the "racism" you condemn: after all, what's not racist about condemning an entire class of women (white, raped and murdered) for the fact that one or two of them are the object of a media clown parade they didn't ask for? With the one or two exceptions a year with which you seem obsessed (and becoming a fetish doesn't mean you get justice -- look at Nicole Brown Simpson), white women victims don't receive this attention, and it's just another increasingly threadbare myth that "whiteness" still parlays into better treatment or more attention by the justice system; most female crime victims, black and white, still lose out in the justice system after they lose a part or all of themselves to crime. And you, sanctimoniously, look at this horror and see nothing but a pretty dead white woman to blame. That makes you culpable in aiding in the other horrible thing these stories do: distract us from the real cost of crime in victims' lives. This isn't the Miss America Pageant, where you can slap a couple of crowns on black, breast-jobbed princesses and call it a day, sweetie, because these aren't the stakes of the game here: you're talking about raped and murdered women. So tone down the glee factor, miss media critic, and when you're ready to look to real statistics about crime, go do it.