Maryland ain't what it used to be
It has taken less than two generations for the state of Maryland to degenerate from being "America in miniature" to the "Massachusetts of the Mid-Atlantic."
Once bounded by ocean beach on the east and high mountains in the west that encapsulated truck farms, huge manufacturing facilities, open space and family values, it is now just a suburb of the cities.
Government has replaced its value system. The job base is service, sales and government, to which all other practical endeavors are secondary. All that is good comes from the "government," be it state, local or federal.
The "government" has plenty of money to teach our kids the difference between right and wrong, keep them healthy, separate them from God-given values. We've lived with an excellent senator, who as an academician has made sure that our "government" spent every cent it could to "take care of us."
How fortunate we are today to have the opportunity to put another academician in as governor of our state. We shall truly be solidified forever as the "Massachusetts of the Mid-Atlantic." Praise the tax dollar.
Praise the academician as a politician. May his knowledge and skill in transferring wealth and the implementation of secular values continue to reduce the need for the nuclear family and its support values.
It is really sad that we can't recognize that politicians spend our money for what they want our world to be. Wouldn't it be nice to spend our money on what we want our world to be?
Paul H. Leamer
Kingsville
Petty egotists
After witnessing Helen Bentley's behavior at the GOP unity brunch, we need to thank those cosmic forces which oversee primary elections that she lost in her bid to run for governor. We are just getting rid of one petulant, petty egotist from the State House. We do not need to install another one there.
Richard L. Shoemaker III
Baltimore
Paine was right
By coincidence I came across the following quotation on the same day you printed a front-page article on the Christian Coalition ("Christian Coalition presses for return to '50s values," Sept. 17):
"I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy . . . I do not believe in the creed professed by any church that I know of. All national institutions or churches -- whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish -- appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind and monopolize power and profit." This was written by Thomas Paine in "The Age of Reason." It was true 200 years ago and it is still true today.
Francis J. Sinek
Baltimore
Unbalanced media
The type of media coverage that the African American male receives is unbalanced. There is an unequal distribution of positive and negative factors.
I acknowledge that a minority of African American males demonstrate antisocial behavior. This is true with the Eurocentric community as well. The difference is that the Eurocentric media coverage is more balanced. The media appears to focus on this population's positive factors, while downplaying the negative ones.
Approximately 70 percent of the United States population is Eurocentric. Approximately 15 percent of the population is African American. Visit any prison and you will view a kaleidoscope of tan, brown and black faces. While the media create these perceptions, the court system regulates them.
I am a 29-year-old black male. I am currently working to put myself through college, while raising a family. The majority of African American males I know are positive men doing positive things.
I recently had an unpleasant experience. I had just exited a mall. I was walking toward my car. A Eurocentric woman was in the process of leaving her car. The woman glanced in my direction. She clutched her purse, got back in her car and locked her doors. She looked at me as if I were a cat and she was a mouse. I felt insulted, perplexed and sympathetic. This woman did not know my character, my love for the arts or my compassion for the less fortunate. Why did she respond in this manner? It was not me that she feared. It was her perception of me.
I ask that you demonstrate more responsibility in your medicoverage. I ask that you make an effort to print positive stories more proportionate to the negative ones. Would it be so difficult to print daily, weekly or even monthly stories on the positive, creative, hardworking African American males?
Brickel Pearson
Baltimore
Christianity today
I was raised to believe that being a Christian meant doing unto others as you would have them do unto you.
If the new definition of Christianity for the '90s means being a narrow-minded, intolerant bigot, then I don't want any part of it.
Carol McFadden
Darlington
Manson for . . ?
Since both Ollie North and Marion Barry have won their respective parties' nominations and are therefore now active candidates in the general election -- is it in order for one to ask that if Charles Manson were to be granted a pardon just what high political office do you suppose he might aspire to?
George E. Hanson
Baltimore
Ollie North mugshot belongs to police file
The leaders of the Christian Coalition really do contradict themselves. In one breath, they say they want a return to the moral values of the 1950s. In their next, they exhort their flock to put the truly degenerate Oliver North in the U.S. Senate.
Perhaps in their ideological blindness, they can rationalize away Mr. North's lying to Congress or his large-scale shipping of weapons to the terrorist regime in Iran. But how can any self-proclaimed Christian ignore the mounting evidence that this called patriot was involved up to his neck in bringing literally tons of illegal drugs into his own country to fund the contra resupply operation?
In the last several months, two full-length books have come out documenting Mr. North's dirty role.
Former CIA contract agent Terry Reed has given eyewitness documentation of the direct, hand-on control Mr. North had of the mid-1980s guns-for-drugs trans-shipment operation from Mena, Arkansas, to Central America. And now, Celerino Castillo, top Drug Enforcement Administration agent in El Salvador in 1985-87, has independently corroborated Mr. Reed's charges in his new book.
All this is in addition to earlier reports published by the Miami Police Department (1984), the Congress of Costa Rica (1989) and a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee, each of which explicitly documented the involvement of the North-controlled network in massively spreading the plague of narcotics into America.
If Mr. North and his supporters lamely reply that he was investigated and cleared of these charges, they are again contradicting themselves. The congressional hearings on Iran-contra virtually ignored the drug issue, and nobody in government ever followed up on the Kerry committee's findings.
Until Mr. North decides to come clean on these (and many other) issues, his picture belongs in a police mug file, rather than the U.S. Senate.
And if the Christian Coalition dares to present a man of this sordid record as a sterling example of their kind of morality, then may God have mercy on their souls.
Robert C. Arnold
Baltimore