I’m responding to a writer in The News on May 15 who promotes torture. If memory serves, this nation went to war ostensibly to stop a brutal dictatorship in a faraway land because it tortured people. If we will do what they will do, then we are no better than them. If torture by one nation permits another to make war on it, who will come for us?
Mayor Byron Brown says the city is safe. I think not. Not if you are a young African-American woman. Not if you just celebrated your 23rd birthday. Not if you are walking along a Buffalo street. Not if your community refuses to come forward to help police.
In response to the May 11 letter, “Take steps to bring people back to God,” as two “born again” Christians, we came from a type of church the writer is longing to return to. It was not getting the message across to us. Since we were introduced to a Biblebased Christian church less than 10 years ago by my daughter, we now understand what it is all about. It is about the birth, crucifixion and resurrection of our Lord and savior, Jesus Christ. We celebrate this every Sunday with praise, worship and song. The word “celebrate” suggests joy and praise that includes song and music praising and glorifying. It sometimes gets loud as we express our joy in our worship.
New data on teen pregnancy offers the typical “good news/bad news” story. The good news is that nationwide, the birth rate for children ages 10 to 19 dropped 9 percent, to the lowest level in seven decades. In Erie County over the past 10 years, teen births for the age group 15 to 19 years dropped more than 10 percent, with City of Buffalo rates dropping a lesser degree — 6.5 percent.
A May 11 letter writer complained: “Those altar rails are now mostly gone, replaced by guitars, amps, cables, jumbo video screens and kids leading singing.” Isn’t that wonderful? The children are participating in the church services, raising their voices to God, worshipping him, and I can join in. Singing is a way of praising God. These children may very well grow up to be those “theologically aware adults in the church.”
Now that former governor Mitt Romney is the presumptive Republican nominee for president, we have a clear choice. However, the choice is not solely on the shoulders of the two candidates; when you vote in November you will also be voting for the team that each candidate brings to the White House. Many members of Romney’s team will be from or related to the Bush team of 2000 and 2004.
In spite of the extremely unlikely doomsday and “24” style scenarios a local proponent of torture puts forth, the use of torture on any person by citizens of the United States in the name of their country is appalling. If terrorists and those who hate the United States—however cruel, aggressive and misguided—believe that their “political fanaticism” is merely standing up for their freedom, and we also believe that our stance on detaining and torturing people—however cruel, aggressive and misguided—is protecting ours, and they ignore the rules, and so do we, who has claim to being right? Who has claim to being the “good guy”? The truth is no one does, and we collectively sink into a moral abyss by perpetrating the same horrors under a different flag.
I can’t get all morally superior about the incident in which Mitt Romney organized the violent public humiliation of a boy whom he and his friends deemed effeminate. When I was a few years younger than Romney was, I organized a similarly brutal humiliation. There is a crypto-sexual aspect to these ritual punishments in prep school, so the experience for the victim must be a lot like rape. But it was a long time ago, the media say, and, besides, the boy is dead.
Isn’t it time we try to squeeze out some good from terrible mistakes and heart-rending tragedies? I speak of Dr. James G. Corasanti’s manslaughter trial. What he did was unforgivable. I find it hard to imagine the extent of the loss to Alix Rice’s mother and father. I reacted to this news the same as everyone else, with terrible anger and sorrow. When I look at the picture of his car, I believe that he must have been driving impaired when he hit and killed her, and then compounded it by driving off. The damage to the car resulting from the impact of that small body speaks for itself, and the driving away speaks for the amount of alcohol he drank. He must have been insensible.
High jinx? Pranks? I doubt seriously if the Secret Service and FBI would accept this justification if a pack of 18-year-old thugs ambushed Mitt Romney, held him down and cut off his well-coiffed hair. Rather, they would ascribe the proper term—assault.
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