Letters to the Editor
Serai1
Published Letters: 527 Editor's Choice: 33
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Stranger danger
[Read the article: Sex offender alert!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The tiger has stripes which fade into the background. This makes the worried man see tigers everywhere. -- Vietnamese saying
Sure sure, nifty idea for those with the paranoid bent among us. But what does this gizmo make of the fact that the vast majority of kids who are sexually abused undergo the crime at the hands of a friend or relative?
People focus way too much on the creepy guy in the park and not enough on the people they might approve of who are actually fooling them. Ask any Child Protective Services investigator - the worst danger to kids in this area isn't hanging around the park. This device, as cute and high-tech as it is, will do little to protect kids, and much much more to make our lives even more cut off from others and miserable than it already is.
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@w mass
[Read the article: The man who lost his past]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The protagonist of Memento did retain his earlier memories. The only span of time he lost was after the attack that led to his wife's death. His inability to remember or form new memories began with the blow to the head; everything before that was left intact.
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It won't work
[Read the article: Desperate times, desperate scientists]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]We humans are a selfish, backward-looking lot, in general. We simply don't care about the other guys, about the future, about anything but our own narrow concerns. There are some people who care, but the majority of us really, really don't. We say we care, oh sure. But we rarely DO anything that proves it.
How many people reading articles like this do more than shake their heads, tsk-tsk, and then switch their light bulbs? We've been convinced by people whose livelihoods depend on it that all we have to do is make these little cosmetic changes and presto! the world will be saved. Uh...NO.
It'll take a lot more than changing light bulbs and driving a smaller car. This is going to take MAJOR changes for just about everyone who isn't at the poverty level. And of course, the people who are the worst offenders are both the least likely to care and the most likely to be able to buy their way out of their obligation to the rest of us. Why should they care? They can build themselves fortresses with underground water storage and hired guards to keep out the riff-raff, while the rest of us bake to death in the broiling sun.
This was inevitable from the beginning. It's built-in. Once you have a species that is capable of redesigning its environment, it'll do precisely that, and never stop. We're simply living out our wretched, self-obsessed fate to the detriment of every single other living thing on earth.
As Kurt Vonnegut would say, "Hi ho!"
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@inspire
[Read the article: Bringing Iran in from the cold]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Yes, indeed. A big problem with our sabre-rattling stance toward Iran (as indicated even in the responses here) is that it's more than a little hypocritical. We sigh and wish the world wouldn't judge us based on our asshole government, yet we cheerfully vow to bash in Iran's brains based on the actions of their asshole government, without a thought to the fact that the country is made up of millions of people who aren't even in the government.
Human rights abuses? Yes, indeed. Iran has a bad track record there. But so do we. Don't believe me? Talk to the people with relatives or friends who get beaten or killed for being gay, or black, or just looking funny. Talk to the towns where dozens if not hundreds of people are sick or dying from toxic waste dumping or feedlot pollution. How about New Orleans? Doesn't letting the entire low-income population of an American city lose everything they have, and even drown, while we watch on TV constitute human rights abuse? No? Well, someone's going to have to explain why not. And we won't even get into the hideously deplorable condition of our jails, the historic ugliness and racist abuses of our government's handling of the "inner cities", the look-the-other-way policies regarding the AIDS crisis espoused by this country's government in the 80's...
America has a historic tendency to refuse to look at things from the other guy's point of view. Because we're America, dammit! We're always right!! If anybody argues with us, we'll just go kick their asses! And people wonder how we've ended up with most of the world either suspicious or downright hating us? Please.
If we're going to claim the high road (a path that we abandoned years ago, in my opinion), then we have to be willing to look at our own faults and admit them honestly. Then we're going to have to come to terms with the fact that we cannot claim to be the good guys if we indulge in the same kind of hateful, violent rhetoric as our enemies. The fact that their ugly behavior is out in the open while ours is hidden away so it's easy to gloss over or deny makes no difference. We are not the Lancelots of the world, riding on white horses to virtuously defend the weak. When we get into with another country, we may be told by our government that it's for nice, kind reasons, but it's rarely been so. Instead, we get nasty for the same reasons any other country does - money, power, prestige.
The day we face up to our feet being made of clay will (I hope) be the day we can start dealing with the rest of the world in a productive fashion that will be good for everybody, not just us here in America. And then "democracy" may actually end up meaning something, instead of being a buzzword we use to assure ourselves we're always right.