Fear of Penalty
I read with interest Police Commissioner Thomas C. Frazier's Dec. 13 Opinion * Commentary article about taking back the city one block at a time, and I must say it sure sounds good on paper.
Mr. Frazier, who sounds like a very liberal type of guy, probably knows better.
What sounds good on paper, as we all know, never pans out in reality. The only way to take back the city is to give the police the powers they used to have without the fear that they will be sued and lose everything they own.
Citizens are sick and tired of talk -- talk from all the politicians, the social do-gooders, etc.
Citizens want to know that they are protected, that their children can walk to school without the possibility of being shot.
They want to feel safe again, and all the talking and publicity about one incident such as the raid near Greenmount Avenue will not cut it. Let's talk about the system.
That and the family breakdown is what has put us in this predictment.
Let's talk about locking up these criminals and educating the youth about the risks they are taking if they decide to get $H involved in crime. Let's put the scare back into the young ones and you will see a better adult.
The problem with society today is that from an early age, children who become teenagers involved in crime have never had discipline nor were they ever scared of the possibility that they might be punished.
If anything, the youth of today put adults in fear of their lives. Something is drastically wrong with that.
Mr. Frazier was hired as police commissioner, not as a liaison between home owners and their blocks.
Linda M. Hess
Sykesville
Con Games
Phillip Knightley's Nov. 28 article, "The Spy Game Was a Con Game," is itself a con game.
Numerous intelligence failures are listed, none of the successes. All of the quoted agents are theirs, not ours.
In a totally misleading last paragraph, Mr. Knightley blithely implies that since World War II, we have had 50 years of "peacetime." That statement conveniently ignores Korea, Vietnam, the Cambodia genocide, the Six Day war, Biafra, the Yom Kippur war, the Falkland Islands war, Uganda, the gulf war, the Kurdish genocide, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, El Salvador, the Rwanda genocide, Haiti, Yugoslavia, Armenia and innumerable other localized conflicts that have produced misery and death for millions and enormous numbers of cross-border refugees. All these situations have seriously threatened world peace and stability and have had a direct or indirect impact on our lives here at home.
Since many of the events listed have occurred or are still under way in the post-Soviet period, with world mayhem on the increase, contrary to our initial euphoric hopes and expectations, we would be absolutely foolhardy to abandon our efforts at intelligence gathering. No one else, friend or foe, is about to do that.
What would Mr. Knightley have us rely on to guide our policy and military preparations in this unbelievably savage world? Voodoo? Astrology?
Certainly those responsible for ignoring the Aldrich Ames fiasco deserved more than they got and certainly it is reasonable to argue that waste must be eliminated. But it is a strange kind of "intelligence" that holds all intelligence to be waste.
Jeffrey Knisbacher
Owings Mills
Without Trappings
Elaine Tassy's Dec. 8 Opinion * Commentary column stated that she does not think the term African-American describes her or almost any of the "black" people she knows.
She states that, like her, they "are without the rich trappings of African culture we should have in order to accurately call ourselves African-American."
Ms. Tassy unwittingly illuminates her personal problem by her choice of words -- the trappings of African culture.
Ms. Tassy has focused on the adornments -- the trappings -- of what she believes to be African culture without any apparent understanding of the centrality of views and values which are the essence of culture -- African or otherwise.
Is Ms. Tassy completely a product of European-American culture? It is doubtful but remotely possible.
However, I am confident that she is far more African than she understands but has been trained to not see or acknowledge her Africanity.
African-American culture is based on a shared history of people from many African ethnic groups.
In fact, African-Americans can best be understood as not a "race" or "black" but as a new African ethnic group coming out of Ashanti, Mandinka, Yoruba, Ga, etc. with a common history resulting from the holocaust of enslavement in America.
I suggest that Ms. Tassy go to Elmina, Cape Coast, Goree Island, etc. and put her hands on the walls of the dungeons to begin her process of rebirth and a higher level of human understanding of what makes her an African-American -- without trappings.
'Kenneth M. Jennings Jr.
Columbia
Changed Vote
It has been interesting to be a Republican and to live and work in Baltimore City.
For 20 years, I have voted for the national Republican candidates and for the state and local candidates whom I felt had the greatest inclination to help the ordinary people.
So I was expecting to support and vote next year for Mary Pat Clarke for mayor.
But I changed my mind very fast when I heard about her City Council bill against protective vests. That bill is government big-brotherism taken to the extreme. It is a gross violation of an individual's right to personal choice.
We have had more than enough of that with William Donald Schaefer. Ms. Clarke's introduction of that anti-vest bill means that I will now vote for the re-election of Mayor Kurt Schmoke.
David Mason
Baltimore
Better Protection
With billions of dollars spent by the U.S. armed forces on sophisticated detection devices, it is unbelievable that the most important individual in our government, our president, has been the target of three attacks within the last few months.
The first one was the still not completely explained crash of an airplane onto White House grounds, close enough to damage the building.
Then there was a burst of automatic gunfire from just outside the White House gates, and now an additional incident.
Surely with detection equipment that during the Persian Gulf war was able to supposedly identify a single soldier, the citizens of our country would expect that the president would not be exposed to danger from a single trespasser in a small but well-defined area near the White House.
Somewhere there has been a breakdown in transfer of technology from the armed forces to the Secret Service. The president deserves better protection than he has been receiving.
Nelson Marans
Silver Spring
Back Pain Therapy
I read with interest the articles Dec. 9 and 10 regarding medical treatment for low back pain in the United States totaling $20 billion a year.
Your articles outlining "conservative therapy," consisting of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and bed rest, miss the most beneficial approach to treatment, which is physical therapy.
Physical therapists are state- licensed following a successful completion of an intensive, highly competitive six-year didactic and clinical study program.
Physical therapists use physical modalities (heat, cold, electricity, light, sound, water, massage, joint mobilization/manipulation and therapeutic exercise) to treat inflammation and disabling pain.
In fact, physical therapists are the health care professionals best trained to evaluate and treat people suffering from musculoskeletal disorders and trauma, including low back pain.
Many critics in other professions, including chiropractic, tout a popular study claiming "manipulation techniques" bode better than "conventional physical therapy modalities" in the treatment of patients with low back pain.
What these critics don't state is that the manipulations cited in that particular study were not done by chiropractors, but by physical therapists, highly trained in this aspect of care as well.
It would behoove physicians and consumers alike to seek out the care of a physical therapist in conjunction with prescribed analgesics and therapeutic exercise to include practicing/learning correct body mechanics.
Relearning posture and correct body-mechanics to perform a given activity is the most critical aspect of preventing further injury to oneself. Find another health care professional that can top that!
Samuel H. Esterson
Baltimore
3' The writer is a physical therapist.
The Sun on Bulletproof Vests
Reading your editorial "Common Sense and Body Armor" I almost fell off my chair.
The Baltimore Sun opposes an opportunity to pass a law to restrict the freedoms of the citizens! Here I thought you were mindless advocates of any law so long as it did not affect certain isolated portions of the First Amendment to the Constitution having to do with the press.
Alas, reading on, your true colors show with the inciting statement that "a street where guns proliferated would be a virtual war zone." The Sun knows the citizenry cannot be trusted with guns, particularly guns with "no sporting purpose."
Heretofore, your convoluted editorial logic was getting you to the point where you would advocate that it would be a crime for a law-abiding citizen to live because their existence presented the criminal element of our society with an opportunity to exploit.
How deftly you have skittered around this dilemma by boldly stating that outlawing body armor "smacks of bureaucratic insanity."
Your words do apply. They apply to more than this.
Phillip W. Worrall
Baltimore
Regarding your editorial "Common Sense and Body Armor":
The term, "bulletproof vest," is a misnomer. "Bullet resistant" would be more appropriate to the success of a vest in stopping a projectile, a function of factors such as the number of layers of Kevlar in the vest, muzzle velocity and design of the projectile.
It is erroneous to state that body armor is a "purely defensive product." Is the armor on a tank a purely defensive product? No, it is intended to keep an offensive capability intact. So it is with a criminal wearing body armor.
It is also erroneous to conclude "a street where everyone wore body armor would be a completely safe street."
What would prevent people from being shot in unprotected areas or being stabbed with a long knife right through the vest?
#Frederick C. Nightingale
Columbia