Letters to the Editor: 10.23.97
A World Without War
Springs
October 17, 1997
Dear Editor,
Lily Tomlin has a good line, "No matter how cynical we get, it's never enough." In the toils and turmoil of the balanced budget restructure, we end up with the Federal Discretionary Budget allocating more ($267 billion) to the military than it does to the total of all other categories ($255 billion). Not to be tiresome, but what happened to the peace dividend? Our country spends seven times more for our "defense" than do the total of all our most likely enemies.
How to explain this anomaly? Rather than have an Army "capable of fighting two full-scale wars" at once, we are prepared to deploy troops all over the world where our corporate interests are threatened. We maintain the School of the Americas to train Central Americans to return to their countries to follow our orders, even if it means killing Jesuit priests and nuns who have encouraged the poor to seek justice.
As Common Cause has known for decades, campaign finance reform is the only route to reordering our House and Senate. When both parties are owned by the same Fortune 500 countries and lobbies, priorities don't change.
Just because we are not at war does not mean we are at peace. Peace includes justice, and while we are making the world safe for the NAFTA and GATT and the newly expanded NATO, for 80 percent of our population their situation, buying power, paychecks, health coverage, public education, housing, and transportation have all been eroding. They are not invited to the Wall Street party and seem unaware that more than half of the national budget is pledged to building more Stealth fighters and Trident nuclear submarines. And $40 billion a year to maintain our nuclear deterrent, the weapons which (best case) we will never use and (worst case) will end it all.
Since 1945, we have known that we can never defend war again. Are we not capable of imagining a world without war? We have successively lost our innocence as war has spread from primitives throwing rocks at each other, or to knights jousting on horseback to the trenches of Argonne, to Dresden, Hiroshima, Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf. Our reasons for sacrificing our youth and slaying thousands, millions of noncombatants are too often for the goal of opening new markets for our goods, extending our sphere of influence, or keeping the price of oil down.
And the weapons systems have evolved into more sophisticated antipersonnel weapons, heat seeking aerial launched missiles, and land mines whose victims are often children and poor village people. For 50 years, we could be motivated to sacrifice by the specter of the Communist menace. Now who is the enemy? The poor, the immigrant, the drug pusher? In fact even at home it is the children and the needy, the elderly, the sick who are the victims of our callous war machine through the distortion in allocating our resources.
Let us at least speak out. On Oct. 24 around the country there will be demonstrations focused on "A Day Without the Pentagon." Here in East Hampton, a march will take place. At 4:30 p.m. on Friday we will assemble in front of London Jewelers and proceed south along Main Street to the green where a brief candlelight prayer service will take place. We look to each other for strength and encouragement. Please join us.
Sincerely,
HELEN FITZGERALD
Progress Report
East Hampton
October 20, 1997
Dear Helen Rattray,
East Enders should take pride in the successful founders dinner hosted on Oct. 17 by Alec Baldwin for the new environmental organization Standing for the Truth About Radiation. Some $45,000 was raised from 75 attendees to help STAR fund its efforts on behalf of those harmed by both radioactive and chemical discharges from the Brookhaven National Laboratory.
They would have been moved to tears to hear Randy Snell describe the anguish of a father living near B.N.L. with a 6-year-old daughter suffering from inoperable cancer of the tongue and throat.
STAR now has an office at 66 Newtown Lane and is planning to offer a progress report at Guild Hall on Friday, Dec. 5, on the theme of "B.N.L.: Problems and Possibilities." We invite all East Enders to attend.
Cordially,
JAY M. GOULD
Funding Alternatives
East Hampton
October 20, 1997
Dear Helen:
The Nature Conservancy remains committed to the preservation of all 98 acres of Shadmoor. Please be assured that we are in no way "resigned" to the idea of abandoning this project as your recent editorial implied.
Over the past three years, the conservancy has led the effort to obtain a Federal commitment to buy Shadmoor. We worked closely with Congressman Michael Forbes in his successful bid to pass Federal legislation allowing the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to make that purchase. Largely through our efforts, and with valuable help from the Town of East Hampton and our Federal elected officials, we have twice obtained Senate support of our request. This past July, Senators D'Amato and Moynihan succeeded in having $2.5 million earmarked to start the acquisition. Regrettably, at the 11th hour, we lost this allocation "in conference."
As I write this letter, we continue working with the conservancy home office in Washington and with Federal officials to pursue other funding alternatives. The Department of Interior appropriations bill has been finalized, but has not yet been signed into law by President Clinton. We understand that it will have a provision for the future appropriation of about $384 million for acquisition and management of Federal lands. As it stands now, the President will have the authority to submit a list of land acquisition priorities for this money. You can be sure that we will continue to press for a commitment of funding from the Executive Office to begin the purchase of Shadmoor.
I urge you and your readers who care about Shadmoor to write to the President and tell him that you expect his office to support an appropriation for Shadmoor of $2.5 million from the $384 million soon to be available. Only through our collective efforts will we succeed.
Sincerely,
SARA DAVISON
Executive Director
The Nature Conservancy
South Fork-Shelter Island Chapter
What We Don't Know
East Hampton
October 20, 1997
To The Editor,
In the fall special issue of Life magazine, the top 100 incredible discoveries, cataclysmic events, and magnificent moments of the past millennium are ranked. Rachel Carson's meticulously researched argument for pesticide control was included in this momentous list.
Thirty-five years have passed since Ms. Carson, with the support of the President's Scientific Advisory Committee, warned the pubic about the toxicity of pesticides. Now, in 1997, a newborn child has a 1 in 600 chance of developing cancer by age 10, because the childhood cancer rates have been increasing every year for the past two decades.
Carol Browner, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is championing tighter controls on pesticides, and Congress passed new laws last year that require taking children's exposures into account when setting standards for pesticide residues in food and contaminants in drinking water.
Slowly but surely people are realizing that chemical companies really don't know what the effects of these highly toxic chemicals are on humans. The latest reports about the chemicals that make up the Fen-Phen diet pills bring this fact to light. It wasn't until over six million people had taken what they thought was a carefully researched, approved drug that the fatal side effects were discovered.
Common sense tells us to lessen our dependence on the 75,000 synthetic chemicals that have been introduced and largely undertested in the last half century. We really don't know what we don't know.
Sincerely,
TINA GUGLIELMO
Safe, Legal Option
Wainscott
October 16, 1997
East Hampton Star,
An important element was omitted from last week's coverage of the Rockville Centre Diocese's 11th anti-abortion "Rosary Procession" against Southampton's Hampton Gynecology, and the East End National Organization for Women pro-choice counter-demonstration.
The element not covered was that in the 1996 election, St. Agnes Cathedral, seat of the Rockville Centre Diocese, was among Catholic churches issuing bulletins against now-elected pro-choice Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy. NOW's objection is not just that the church attempts to stop physicians from providing needed services, it is also that these conservative religious organizations spend time and money lobbying against women's rights, a political activity their tax-exempt 501-3C status theoretically precludes.
Women's rights groups protest the church's attempt to impose sectarian religious beliefs on all American women and on health-care providers of other faiths. Many believe it is immoral to bring into the world children parents can neither love nor feed. Birth control is neither universally available nor safe for all women, and, indeed, the Catholic Church continues to besmirch pregnancy prevention as "intrinsically evil." In such a mine field, it is extremely important the termination of pregnancy remains a safe, legal option for American women.
SANDY RAPP
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