Show mm Friday August 2 2002 A4 The Herald Journal Our view No A place to hide “She has a large prosperity” (when the word “posterity” was Herald Journal reader no doubt meant) pointed out the following word “There” (in place “their”) usage errors in recent editions of “Here” (in place of “hear”) the newspaper It’s a long list to be sure but “Fur trees” what this reader doesn’t realize (instead of fir) is that The Herald Journal inten“Illicit a response” tionally commits several in (mistakenly spelling and grammatical errors of elicit) each day just to see if readers place “Tight-nit” are paying attention (painfullysub-stitute- d No that’s not true We are for“tight-knit- ’) duly embarrassed And since the “Diffuse the situation” (when newspaper often uses this space defusing of said situation is each Friday to make fun of the what was truly needed) foibles and follies of others it’s ‘To he and I” (instead of the certainly time we took a good grammatically proper “to him shot to the chin ourselves and me") Ouch! -- Your view - and animals whim these fires i cally explode and race up the hill? Doesn't it bother you when men die fighting the fires? How do you feel lb the editor about thousands of homes being This is a letter of protest burned? Couldn’t the billions of dolWhat kind of justice is it to put a lars spent or lost be used to better man with health probadvantage? How can animals exist lems in jail for 90 days for a single when the downed trees and underunintentional incident? The victim brush are so thick they can’t even get needs to see that there are consethrough? How much further damage will be done when rains and snow quences” Who is really the victim here the child or the hapless man crone and cause floods? If I were you being persecuted more than prosecutI would be ashamed of myself you ed? are to blame I would like to ask the ' If the child is to suffer lasting harm public a question also How long are from this affair it will be the guilt she we going to let these “E” bullies run will carry for having sent a nice man our public lands? They are bent on a friend to jail stopping all logging mining oil Surely the courts nave more drilling and want to shut out the public from enjoying our mountains and important cases to deal with than a one time slip of a good man a man forests (Tty picnicking who has been determined by tests hot or camping in the Grand Staircase to be a pedophile nor a danger to the National Monument) We can build roads thin the forests and build fire community In any case the sentence seems breaks If OTR vehicles do damage " excessive As they said in The Mikagates could keep them out All these do “Let the punishment fit the dungs could be dime in an environcrime" mentally friendly manner Let’s get Yours in strong and solemn objecwith it We ought to round up all the ' ' tion “E” bullies and put them on the fire line They would change their attitude in a hurry Are we going to wait Marjorie Simaid ' till all the forests bum? The togged Logan and replanted forests in Washington sight-seei- Blame Are woes on ‘E’ bullies J Bum baby bum Bill A1 and their extreme environ- mental ist bullies must be in the heights of their glory as the West bums They have used the ultra-libercourts and judges as “Bully Masters” to further their agenda They have thrown out all common sense in favor of their own mistaken ideas Elwin Allred has written twice about how they manage their forests in Europe They clean them out and thin them He said they farm them They are known around the world for their beauty Some comments cm TV during these fires from supervisors: Uintah — There are more trees down than standing U wiH be near impossible to stop We can’t get to the fire” Arizona— There should ideally be 40 trees per ncrfe Here there are several ' hundred It is nearly impossible” Idaho — There is no way to get to the fire hot even oh foot” I would like to ask the environmentalist bullies a few questions How canyou fight fire with no roads or across? What happens to the birds al ' : i Estrangement the real epidemic By Ellen Goodman The Boston Globe Molestation punishment unfair Ibthqeditor ' JUST TUNC 0T IT AS A'KICKBACK !' ng are beautiful Ttoo years ago I asked a forest ranger how many homes could have been built with die trees burned that summer His answer was “several hundred thousand” Now fires are threatening the Sequoias in California The “E” bullies hate log- ging so bad that they apparently would rather see the forests burned than “farm” them: They have used lies and fear to scam the public Now they are reaping the whirlwind David C Weeks Smithfield began to appear on milk cartons in the 1970s By die New Jersey began to fingerprint school children When Congress declared a National Missing Children’s Day die media spread the alarming statistic strangers is after all a staple of old mythology and primal nightmares Village folklore was full of tales of gypsies and vagrants Even if there were only five such cases a year says Finkelhor it would touch a nerve “You can’t talk people out of mid-198- 0s I turn on the news expecting the worst and I find it Another girl has been abducted This time the dateline is Missouri This time the girl is Casey Williamson And this time she’s been murdered Is this die season of fear? The summer of abductions? Ota June 5 Elizabeth Smart was taken from her bed in Salt Lake City at gunpoint reawakening our slumbering terror of the stranger : that 13 million children were missing and 50000 were abducted every ET who crones -- after our dren Since then the names and die details have become all too famichil- liar ld Samantha Runnion was playing Clue outside her Stanton Cauf home when she was snatched sexually assaulted and Five-year-o- murdered Erica Pratt was taken from her Philadelphia row house to a basement where she managed miraculously” to escape On TV we see the anguish of die parents and the anger of the advocates On one channel Mark Klaas whose daughter Polly was abducted in 1993 declares an “epidemic” On another a cable show host acts like a public health expert warning of a growing outbreak in the community And across the country parents seem to describe the same painful symptom: fear “The world is more unsafe now" says one mother “I watch my more closely” won’t “I another allow a Says stranger near my lads” says father Photos of missing children first Seven-year-o- ld i that with numbers” But today our “tribes” fed more fragile and our personal communities less stable When we tell our children — Ss we must — to beware of strangers there are more people who wear that label If bur immune system is overwhelmed by this “epidemic” it may also be because our children are routinely placed in die hands of strangers from doctors to teachers to day caregivers They are placed as welt in foe hands of television producers and Internet Web masters As Finkelhor suggests “All our anxiety about feeling that we don’t have control oyer our children gets symbolically focused oq foe idea that someone is trying to take them from year It took time for the facts to catch up to our darkest fantasies Now we know that the vast majority of die missing are runaways and as many as 90 percent of die abducted are snatched by a parent fighting for custody We know too that as “epi- denics” came and went the number of abductions by strangers hovered between 200 and300 a year The number of murders by strangers remained around 30 a year These were the figures in 1993 when Polly Klaas was murdered They were die figures in 1994 when Susan Smith drowned her children and blamed it on a stranger And in all the yean before Elizabeth Smart’s disappearance started this new “outbreak” There is no way to exagger- -' ate die pain of parrots who have lost a child No calculator was ever made that could overestimate fee sum of their anguish But it is possible to exaggerate the danger And so it is worm asking why we are susceptible to this epidemiology David Finkel-ho- r a University of New Hampshire sociologist who studies crimes against children says that this is an “archetypal” fear It touches every parent who has ever lost sight of a toddler in a supermarket aisle or watched a bicycle off to school or waited t—a nd waited and waited — for a teenager to come home from the mall We may just be programmed to believe that someone from another “tribe” will come and steal our chiK dren The terror of losing a child to ' us” No I don’t agree with die mother who says the world is more unsafe now I remember polio I remember growing up under the mushroom cloud of the Cold War This year terrorism expanded the repertoire of my imagination more than even the hor-rible tales of child abduction But as the images overwhelm the numbers I notice how we identify and mourn with families we know roily through television Meanwhile our neighbors become the strangers It isn’t child abduction that recycles in such overwhelming propor-tions It’s fear There is no epidemic of abduction by strangers But there may be a contagious and chronic first-grad- er case of estrangement Ellen Goodman’s is ail eflengood-manOgtobexo- m Other views These letters and other personal essays In the Herald Jour-- nal may express opinions that do not align exactly with your own If you disagree please respond with a letter to the edNor or contact edNor Charles ' McCofcxn about a possible guest com1 Ext 3020 mentary (Phone: cmccottumOhjnewscom) See information box at bottom of page for more details 752-212- Congress did Ohio a favor with Traficant bough itlooktuifbca through onemightbee httkwuy of writing a political obituary for for- mer US Reb James A Traficant the Youngstown Democrat expelled from Confess following his convic- don on federal corruption bribery and charges After 411 his entire career as a “public servanf” has been a ( tax-evasi- on 20-ye- ar fact that while he occasionally helped others he was always helping Mmulf mmipriy trying pnUHri power the voter give him foe per ' gigantic improbability Reviewing it one can only marvel at how far the man got on little more than populist WuirfNujtt! 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