Prepare for Caffeine Wars
What an opportunity. What terrific news. Caffeine is addictive!
We can invigorate the economy. Borrowing from our experience with the drug war, we should immediately declare the growing, sale or use of any product containing caffeine illegal.
We will, thereby, increase jobs in the criminal justice system -- more police, judges, prosecutors, prison guards, support staff.
We will open new opportunities for children. The war on drugs has given them, some not even teen-agers, the opportunity to make more than they could imagine making in any other way.
And the infrastructure. More prisons, court rooms, caffeine treatment centers, airplanes to search for caffeine smugglers, not to mention the increased sale of guns.
Traffickers in caffeine will need to protect their markets without the assistance of the police. Terrific. The National Rifle )( Association should love that one.
And for the true caffeine addict, what a boon. While at first glance it might appear the users will be without their favorite drug, a more careful analysis would indicate that caffeine, like other drugs, would still be readily available.
Admittedly, the price may be higher, but the greater concentration would be something a caffeine aficionado would find totally satisfying.
The few that would die from contaminated products would be the exception. But all progress has some cost.
Go for it!
Stanley L. Rodbell
Columbia
The Movers
In this matter between the Housing Authority of Baltimore City and Baltimore County Executive Roger Hayden and Rep. Helen Bentley, there are a lot of people who are not being addressed.
These are the people who are decent and who keep up the property they are renting, who even try to beautify their surroundings by planting gardens and keeping the grass cut.
With all the commotion going on with the residents in the Essex and Dundalk communities, I am sure that they have come across persons who do not care how their property is kept.
My family and I want to get out from among the people who don't care, for we have been fighting to keep our surroundings clean despite the ones who often thwart our efforts.
We welcome better, clean, safe communities that share the same views on clean and decent housing for all.
I hope and I pray that Mr. Hayden and Mrs. Bentley remember, when they speak on the Moving To Opportunities program, that there are people living in public housing in the city who are clean and decent, who do not want to live amid trouble and heartache but welcome peace and serenity, nonviolence and clean neighborhoods with open arms.
Yvonne Maria Wilson
Baltimore
Eternal Haiti
The world truly goes round and round.
Bill Glauber of The Baltimore Sun wrote about conditions in Haiti in a Sept. 22 article reprinted in the San Francisco Chronicle. He said:
"The U.S. Marines of Golf Company, second platoon, never dreamed it would be this awful.
'"They were never told of the pigs lying in the gutters or the human waste washing onto the streets. But most of all, from their vantage point behind a barbed-wire barricade on 24th Street in the heart of a dirty, depressed little city, nothing could have prepared these Marines for the faces of the poverty-stricken Haitians they have come to aid."
They could have been told because C.P. Lynch, assistant Surgeon, U.S. Navy, had visited the area. He wrote about Cape Haitien drainage and sewage that "this drainage is conducted to the harbor by open gutters of various structures, the latest being built of cement and stone. The majority of residences have a small surface drain which leads to the street, and in many sections of the town where the gutters are in bad condition numerous cesspools exist and are a constant source of danger and annoyance."
Dr. Lynch wrote this in the U.S. Naval Medical Bulletin almost 80 years ago during the American occupation. One might have hoped that conditions had improved since U.S. military forces were "inserted."
However, the assistant surgeon dared to make some political observations which is always risky for a physician and particularly risky for one in the military service. He wrote: "The constant revolutions and existing financial conditions of Haiti no doubt have a depressing influence on the adoption of more modern methods of sanitation."
Joseph L. Mcgerity, M.D.
Mill Valley, Calif.
Taking a Jab
A Sept. 27 editorial in The Sun could not resist using the Jimmy Smyth case to take a jab at Gerry Adams during his visit to the United States.
The Sun states that Mr. Adams "will return to the United Kingdom and not be persecuted there for what he will have said here." This must come as quite a relief to Mr. Adams, as he has always been persecuted for what he has said by the British government.
The broadcast ban, censoring the speech of all Sinn Fein members, was lifted less than three weeks ago in Britain, only after clear signals were sent by the U.S. that Mr. Adams would be touring here.
Gerry Adams is still prohibited from travel in England, Scotland and Wales by virtue of the government's exclusion order. This certainly sounds like persecution to a citizen of a country where free speech is an inalienable right.
Concerning Mr. Smyth, The Sun lambastes Judge Barbara Caulfield's decision to deny Mr. Smyth's extradition to Britain. To argue that Mr. Smyth would not be persecuted due to his political opinions is ludicrous.
Finally, to compare the Smyth case with the non-germane World Trade Center incident is a cheap grandstanding ploy at best.
If The Sun is so interested in seeing that justice be served, why doesn't the paper report on such cases as Mr. Smyth's when they happen or are ruled on, rather than inserting a gratuitous two-liner in its "Other News" section and later espousing the
editors' perceived judicial wisdom?
John P. McNichol
Linthicum Heights
RF The writer is chair, Irish Northern Aid Committee, Baltimore unit.
Retaining a Sense of History
Your Sept. 30 editorial page reached a new nadir for self-contradiction.
Did anyone besides me note the inherent inconsistency of wooing the Disney "history" theme park for Maryland and a paragraph later decrying the dwindling arable land and increasing population on planet Earth?
Maryland is a diminutive state with more than its share of suburban sprawl but contains some of the best farm land extant.
Theme parks are not only inherently inedible but ruin gargantuan portions of green and pleasant land.
Why is there an unquestioned acquiescence to the effect that theme parks are good for humanity? I know that they create jobs, but what sort of jobs?
Is the chief end of man to employ hamburger flippers, highway contractors and unemployed actors in overheated costumes cavorting as periwigged cartoon characters?
I find it similarly incongruous that Disney wishes to create a theme park emphasizing "history." Thinking of myself as more historically conscious than average, the very thought of a theme park strikes me as antithetical to any sense of history.
One's cognizance of history is best nurtured in areas untouched by the sort of inevitable commercial blitzkrieg contemplated by theme park infrastructure. Oddly enough these areas survive in unsullied corners of this overcrowded state.
Anyone looking for a historical fix should read works by John McGrain and explore the western extremes of the C&O; Canal, the Quaker farmhouses and barns in northern Baltimore County, the mills of Woodberry, Blair Valley in Washington County, the tidy Methodist chapels and cemeteries on the Eastern Shore (the farther away from U.S. 50 the better), the combined mayor's office and grocery store in Little Orleans.
These beguiling localities resonate with a haunting evocation of the past which any theme park would unalterably ruin.
Although the above-mentioned localities have not created many jobs, neither will they cost the legislature $160 million in "incentives" to be paid for by the increasingly beleaguered and anti-incumbent taxpayer.
Paul R. Schlitz Jr.
Baltimore