LETTERS
|
|
|
|
I really want to thank you for this great article, and the photos. I have only seen one other site that covered Julia's story as well as yours. I am very grateful that you are getting her story out to all those who visit your site. Butterfly's mother I am writing to say how inspiring we found your account of the 6 month tree sit of Julia Butterfly. I am one of a group working to save Lyminge forest near Canterbury in England. Local residents did all they could to protect this forest. We know it is over a thousand years old. It contains Bronze Age Burial Mounds and settlement sites dating from the Bronze Age through the Iron Age, the Romans and the early medievals. It also contains endangered species of birds. We now have treehouses and tunnels and bunkers. Our forest was due to be destroyed last year but the defenses we have put up has saved it so far. It is strictly a non-violent protest. We simply make it too expensive to remove us. The Government plans to sell it to a private organization, Rank, to be turned into a holiday park. It seems it is wanted because it is the nearest forest to the Channel Tunnel. We salute the courage of Julia. We think it wonderful if we survive 3 weeks in a treehouse. She inspires us all. We need her and many like her if our children are to know and learn from the magnificance of wilderness. Janine Roberts, protester Thank you for the article about the redwoods; Julia is very inspirational. "Reeson" Many thanks for your efforts to make the truth available. I am encouraged and inspired thereby. Tom Parsons A Half-Hearted Defense of Tina Brown I'm sorry you are sleepless over the dearth of letters you receive. I can hardly understand why; perhaps your reportage and positions are so congruent to that of your readers that there is literally nothing to say or criticize. However, I would certainly have loved to see Tina Brown tortured and roasted. She destroyed the New Yorker, a magazine much beloved by me for many years because of its calm voice, impeccable grammar and syntax, profound and timeless intellectual appeal, inevitably hopeful covers and abhorrence for celebrity and fame. The tone adopted by the writers was so personal and direct -- never condescending. I really relished the lengthy biographies of unknown heroes (like the two final issues devoted to surfing and surfers off of Ocean Beach in SF) and the absence of any blurbs, sub-blurbs or horn-tooting in the table of contents and the total absence of articles on current TV events. (I hate TV!) I'm a photographer, yet I appreciated the absence of photographic images. Magazines, imitating TV, have today fewer and fewer words and more and more images. Sound bites have replaced thought and reflection. Definitely a return to a more primitive era (and we ask why Johnny can't or won't read). Instead you allowed your writer to whitewash her tenure at the Magazine I loved and which she destroyed. The last of its kind! I doubt we will ever see anything like it ever again. how sad to finally lose the last of its kind. Extinction is never pretty. But there is still a chance for you to redeem yourselves -- go for her jugular! Curtis Degler Human Time Bomb "According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), if the external debt of the 20 poorest countries of the world, many of them African, were written off today, it could save the lives of 21 million children before the year 2000. Read the other way round, this figure means that uncancelled debt could be responsible for the deaths of 130,000 children a week till 2000." To put things into perspective, this is the equivalent of a Hiroshima bombing every four days in poor countries ... Todd Lorentz Many of the Boston Globe's readers in its local circulation area are disgusted with the Globe's outrageous treatment of its former columnist Patricia Smith. Ms Smith, of course, has acknowledged fabrications of certain quotations. In this, she is distinguished only by her public abasement. On a daily basis featured Globe staffers embroider alleged facts and quotations. Especially grave allegations of deceit have dogged the paper's two other metro columnists, Mike Barnicle and Eileen McNamara, for years. [Editor's note: Barnicle resigned August 19, after it was revealed that he had completely fabricated at least one story.] McNamara is less well known, but received the 1997 Pulitzer for commentary. To understand how signal McNamara's abuse of the readers' trust has been and how it relates to Smith, some background is necessary. Shortly before getting her Pultitzer, McNamara wrote a column relating to a very controversial state prosecution of three members of a local family, the Amiraults. During the mid-1980s,the Amiraults ran a daycare center near Boston. They were charged with and convicted of dozens of counts of child sexual abuse at a time of national hysteria on this sensitive topic. Since that time the Amiraults' cases have wound tortuously through the state appellate courts, tipping first toward the prosecution then the defense. Because two members of the family were tried separately from the third, the former are now free awaiting a retrial that is higly unlikely to take place while the latter rots in jail on exactly the same facts knowing he has little chance of release prior to completion of a long sentence. The difference lies in rulings made by the individual judges having control of the bifurcated prosecutions. Throughout this vindictive and arbitrary process McNamara relentlessly has brutalized all three members of the Amirault family. Facts and law alike appear irrelevent to her campaign of printed disparagement. This past June, McNamara wrote a column pillorying Smith for her fabrication of some material to enliven columns. Viewed in the context of McNamara's ill-conceived attacks on the Amiraults, her subsequent attack on Smith is completely outrageous. To be sure, Smith's made-up quotes were an abuse of trust. However, they did not contribute to the continued false imprisonment of anyone. Thus one easily may argue that they are much less serious than the allegations against McNamara. The Globe's tenacious defense of McNamara has deeper roots: Discipline of McNamara inevitably will force it -- as well as the entire journalistic power structure -- to confront the nasty problem of McNamara's 1997 Pulitzer. Calling Janet Cooke .... Also, the conservative McNamara is typical of the increasingly rightward drift of The Globe since it was purchased by The New York Times. She will rock no boats, and can be counted on to faithfully support the established position on any controversy. Allied with her are virtually all other opinion writers, syndicated or staff, published by the Globe -- the loathsome Jeff Jacoby, George Will, Mona Charen, etc. Of its regularly printed columnists, only Robert Kuttner approaches Smith in views or place on the political spectrum. Following Smith's departure, the Globe's pen of Op-Ed and metro columnists is completely white, and almost entirely male and right-wing. In short, at present The Globe has virtually no one writing for it who expresses the views of readers from the Clintonista neoconservative camp leftward -- a HUGE slice of the political pie. It is this harshly reactionary alignment of its writers that has Globe readers so bitter about Smith's departure following her offenses. Ralph Palermo (Massachussetts) Chiquita - Newspaper Controversy Still Growing "About the only place you can still find the original version of the May 3 special section is on Lexus/Nexus (for a fee) and at the public library (on microfilm). And The Enquirer might have the ability to remove the series from those locations, too." Well, some time has passed since that was written in the Cincinnati CityBeat (and later posted at the Monitor). In case you haven't found it already, the complete series is on the Internet at a personal web site. Gary D. Shapiro Blame union leaders for sweatshops The cost of purchasing items in the stores in the United States is higher due to the fact that the Union Leaders, in order to make themselves appear effective, call for strikes by the Union members for higher pay. This, as everyone is aware, results in higher costs for the consumer. I, for one, compare prices for most of the items that I purchase, and go for the best bargain. The Union leaders would be hard pressed to find a more lucrative job than the one that they now have. Marjorie Medberry Blame gays and feminists A former Marxist once concluded they could destroyed America from within if feminists and homosexuals undermined the moral foundation of our free society. If we can't live morally, a free society will degenerate into dictatorship. Such where the circumstances in the 1920s democratic Germany when the Nazis grew in power; homosexuality and pre-marriage sex was common. The Nazi Party was even started by homosexuals. Their new chosen targets today? Gay marriage and sex education on children. Now under assault by gay activists and the Educational Establishment are children! No place is safe. Please help the public wake up to the truth about the Gay Lifestyle. Please support School Vouchers - a Parents Right to Choose. By expressly declaring homosexuality to be an official civil right, homosexual behavior would be put on the same level as race and nationality. This means homosexual activists would be awarded the police power of the state to use against those who disagreed with them. If homosexuality becomes a civil right, persons engaging in homosexual conduct would have power over and above the rights of average citizens. Bravely point this out to everybody. The Army tried a seriously flawed experiment designed to make women appear strong as men. After working with special diets and a strict exercise regime, most of the women in the study only minimally qualified for "very heavy" military specialties. This "study" will be used to try and rebut the fact that women are not equally equipped to survive in combat. Military leaders opposing advances of feminism have suffered. Navy Admirals Stanley Arthur, Frank Kelso and Henry Mauz were cashiered. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jeremy Boorda went to Capitol Hill to promise Rep. Patricia Schroeder that he would help feminize the sea service. He later committed suicide. The women most likely to be affected don't support these radical changes, you may be surprised to learn. Most of this came from the politically-incorrect. Now we should vote Republican for a change. Thanks for your concern. Richard Moss Blame Detroit WHY NOT GOV. CONTROL OVER AUTO MANUFACTURES TO KEEP THE HORSEPOWER DOWN AND CONCENTRATE ON COMFORT? WHAT A WASTE! LARRY & JEN Jam Packed The following articles are contained in the July issue of VOICES FROM SPIRIT MAGAZINE:
VOICES FROM SPIRIT is a small publication but as you can see, it is jam packed with information. Yours In The Service Of The Light,
Albion Monitor August 22, 1998 (http://www.monitor.net/monitor)
All Rights Reserved.
Contact rights@monitor.net for permission to use in any format.
|