'Knee-jerk' rightist views offer nothing
Columnist Mona Charen, desperately trying to find a crime to accuse Hillary Clinton of committing (Other Voices, April 5), instead decides to create one.
She asks numerous times if the reader would do what Mrs. Clinton did at various times in the past, concluding that her actions make her look "unscrupulous and a little tawdry."
If Ms. Charen is, as she claims, more interested in crippling the Clinton presidency on issues like health care, why doesn't she do so? Why must she create phony issues like her so-called "Would you do it" test? I suspect this is because she has no ideas on solving these tough problems.
Like many Republicans who are knee-jerk critics of the president and his wife, she is using her objections to government activism as a reason for doing nothing, and as an excuse for their inability to solve problems they seem to have no idea how to handle.
She goes on to complain that Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas and "scores of other conservatives" were "pilloried" by the press.
She accuses the media of hypocrisy for not coming to their rescue but seems to feel it is wrong for them to re-examine their over-zealousness in reporting on the Whitewater affair now that it has become apparent that the press has spent over two months headlining an insignificant matter.
Her argument is absurd. If there is any concern for fairness in reporting on Whitewater, it is hard to find in the mountain of highly critical opinions of the president and his family that has come from the press since the days he was elected.
President Clinton was elected by Americans who wanted someone who will get things done, not because they expected him to be a saint.
In fact, they elected him knowing full well that he was not faultless. Many of these people were conservatives who agreed with his economic policies.
I am sure that The Evening Sun can find someone who could better represent conservative views than Ms. Charen. Her lazy, do-nothing-but-complain brand of conservatism gives her flimsy arguments when discussing the many serious problems that our country confronts.
Joe Otterbein Jr.
Baltimore
Pay the price
Jon Margolis' "Light up and smoke -- a strike for freedom" (Other Voices, March 29) has some very good points. A person with an addiction for a legal drug such as nicotine should be able to get a lift at work, and also when out on the town during the evening.
There should be special smoking rooms in office buildings, ventilated areas in restaurants, bars, night clubs, etc.
When lung cancer, emphysema, stroke or a heart attack happens to a tobacco user, all care costs should be paid by the user.
Tobacco products should be taxed to fund all of the above. The amount of tax per year would be dependent upon how much money was reimbursed to the executors of the above measures during the previous year.
If smokers, chewers and sniffers render harm to themselves, they should be allowed to do so, but they should pay all related costs.
Charles Johnston
Pasadena
Additives
Smokers, prepare for more blitzes from the so-called scientific areas.
The blitz that could send me rolling in the aisle is when it will probably be said that even outside, smoking is bad and helping destroy the ozone layer.
But, then again, what can be expected when science doesn't utter a word of disapproval about prepared foods sold with three, four or five times more sodium than potassium?
Emil Antos
Dundalk
Correct speech
In his April 6 Other Voices essay on politicized language, Steven Pinker makes an extraordinary concession, coming from a professor of cognitive sciences when he says, "Respect means treating people as they wish to be treated, beginning with names. That is why there is a clear need for guidelines."
The essence of the cognitive process is seeing and identifying. Neither step is advanced by "guidelines" that tell the observer in advance what is an acceptable perception.
It may be true, as Professor Pinker declares, that "words are not thoughts," but words happen to be our only means of crystallizing thoughts (for our own use) and communicating them.
The PC police understand this issue better than some of free speech's defenders. Why else battle against certain words, which are harmless things in themselves, if not for the hope that if the offensive word disappears, the thought (and action flowing from the thought) will go with it?
It may be of little importance whether we describe a person in a wheelchair as a "cripple" or by some other term preferred by a lobby claiming to represent people in wheelchairs.
Similarly, if Professor Pinker chooses to accept the politicized "native American" despite the factual and anachronistic fallacies contained in those two words, that is his privilege; not a triumph of cognition, but the chore of seeing and identifying is each individual's.
But if Professor Pinker thinks that the widespread efforts to regulate speech are a symptom only of the familiar "euphemism treadmill" that replaces "toilet" with "bathroom," or a sign of "changing linguistic fashions," he gives too little credit to the people expending considerable energy to remove words and images from their fellow citizens' experience.
He trivializes two issues that deserve serious consideration: first, the connections between words, thoughts and actions; and second, whether it is appropriate to regulate words and thoughts except by counter-argument.
It may well be true, for example, as someone said of racial hatred, that "the lie begets the murder"; the warped identification opens the way for the warped act. It may be true, as radical feminists insist, that the pornographic fantasy begets the rape.
But these statements may also not be true, or not true in very many cases, and the question at the heart of the PC debate is whether the process of cognition on race, sex and many, many other matters should be impaired by "guidelines," lest someone reach a conclusion that someone else doesn't like.
John C. Boland
Baltimore
Class size makes a lot of difference
It is totally incredible to me that Baltimore City Councilwoman Vera P. Hall of the Fifth District would suggest that "class size is one of the lowest indicators of successful teaching."
After making this statement with no research whatsoever to back it up, she claims that she has been a teacher for 15 years in which she had 35 children in her class.
I never would believe that there is any teacher in our educational system that would say 35 children in a classroom could get the individual attention to their needs just as well as if there were only 25 children in the classroom.
When you count the minutes in each day and think of spending just a few minutes helping children with individual needs or answering their questions, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to realize the benefits of smaller class sizes.
In city kindergarten classes, for example, there are learning stations where the youngsters move from one activity to another learning important skills.
Trying to teach 35 children to print their names, learn a few sight words, learn to count and show many other skills certainly is compounded in difficulty by the number of children in the classroom.
In the primary grades, the class is divided into smaller groups for reading. Isn't it obvious that 25 children will have more opportunities to read aloud and be helped than 35? It is not Council President Mary Pat Clarke who is being strictly political in this case for recommending the implementation of such an important plan.
I would like teachers to write in and tell if, in their teaching experience, they find that 35 children in a classroom can learn and get the individual attention for their emotional needs just as well as 25.
I suggest that it is 100 percent obvious who is making a political case out of the huge needs of our city school children, and it is not Ms. Clarke.
In fact, I would not be surprised if, on this issue, Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke would also be in agreement with Ms. Clarke. Let's join together in a non-political fight for our children in the Baltimore City school system. Give them a chance for the best education we can manage. These children are our future.
L. Broder
Baltimore