OUR VIEWS Auburn's 'genius'
The best thing about being named a MacArthur Fellow is that you get $500,000 over five years to use as you please, no questions asked and no suggestions made as to its use.
What's more, you don't even have to apply because the selection process begins with an anonymous network of nominators who suggest recepients to an anonymous selection committee.
The best thing about the MacArthur Foundation's "genius grant" program for the rest of us is the chosen recipients are usually people who are already working hard to make some aspect of society better.
The money they receive often ends up going into the very projects they are already working on or to similar new projects for which they have lacked the necessary financial resources. The result is that we all benefit from the grant.
A case in point is Samuel Mockbee, architect and Auburn University professor, who learned Tuesday that he is one of this year's MacArthur recepients, the fourth from Alabama in the 20 years that the grants have been made.
A successful private architect before becoming an academian, Mockbee is a founder of Auburn's Rural Architectural Studio, which sends Auburn students into the Black Belt to design and build homes and community facilities for impoverished clients. The facilities often make use of recycled items and other materials no longer considered normal construction materials.
The students get experience in problem-solving and architecture and are exposed to parts of society they might never have seen before. The clients have some of their needs met. The community in which the students work is improved physically.
Mockbee has already indicated at least some of the "genius grant" money will go into the studio program. Regardless of what he does with the rest of it, we suspect the result will be improved lives for less fortunate Alabamians.
MacArther recipients have a genius for using money in that way.
The bloody mantle
The old injunction "speak nothing but good of the dead" was sorely tested by the death of Syrian dictator Hafez Assad. He was a constant in a region of turmoil, but that constancy was to be implacably anti-Israel abroad and brutally repressive at home.
President Clinton managed to say he respected Assad, found him "open and straightforward" and felt that Assad had, in his final days, "made a strategic choice for peace" — even though just this March the Syrian leader badly stiffed Clinton over a peace proposal.
Clinton's glum expression on receiving the news of Assad's death may have been less out of grief than the realization that a Mideast peace settlement to cap his term of office is now, in all likelihood, out of reach.
Even Clinton's close ally in that quest, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, is currently immobilized by domestic disputes.
The White House's best hope — and it's only real policy option — is for a stable successor government under Bashar Assad, and further hope that Bashar is more open-minded and less brutal than his old man.
Even though Hafez Assad, who was 69 and perhaps older, was clearly dying, he seems to have made only belated efforts to ensure his son's succession.
That was evident in the haste by which parliament made him commander in chief — promoting him to full colonel to do so — and changed the constitution so Bashar, only 34, could become president.
Syria is a republic on paper, and if Bashar Assad is an advocate for liberalization — as the West, perhaps out of wishful thinking, assumes — he must first consolidate his grip on power.
Already he faces a challenge from an uncle, and there are undoubtedly others waiting for a misstep or a sign of weakness in the young leader.Like his father, Bashar Assad labors under the handicap of coming from a suspect religious minority.
Even if he wanted to, Bashar Assad is probably not in a position to sign a peace agreement with Israel — even if it means the return of the Golan Heights — or withdraw Syrian troops from Lebanon.
But he is in a position to open Syria to the outside world — the Internet is forbidden and credit cards largely unknown — both to ideas and investment. He is in a position to end state control of a corrupt, moribund economy.
That course might be Assad's best hope of surviving as Syria's leader unless, like his father, he is willing to kill his rivals before they have a chance to kill him.
YOUR VIEWS
THE MAIL Guns are not the top killer of children
Of all guns in America, 99.9 percent are never used in crimes. The No. 1 killer of children is motor vehicle accidents — 16.6 per 100,000. Falls are No. 2 at 5.3, poison No. 3 at 3.9 on down to choking at 1.1 per 100,000. However, only 0.5 children per 100,000 are killed by guns.
America has 5 million swimming pools and 45 million homes have firearms. Yet 500 children per year are drowned while only 40 are killed by firearms.
Although the Bill Clintons the Al Gores and the Rosie O'Donalds of America want to take away the guns that protect us, they know they'll never get the guns used in crimes. Personal firearms are used 1.5 million times per year for self protection, many times without even firing a shot.
There are 700,00 physicians in the U.S.A. There are 120,000 accidental deaths caused by physicians each year. This equates to 0.171 accidental deaths per physician.
There are 80 million gun owners in the U.S.A. There are 1,500 accidental gun deaths per year. This equates to 0.0000188 accidental deaths per gun owner.
Conclusion: A doctor is approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than a gun owner.
Howard F. Stearns
109 Sterling Drive Northwest
Huntsville
Violent culture
In response to "Si" Simmons May 7 letter that participants in the Million Mom March campaign are "marching in mass to mask their material miscarriage of moral misguidance," I present statistics.
Twenty percent of all American children live below the federal poverty level, with millions more subsisting at a level that leaves them with poor access to enriching resources, including enough to eat. As per the author, the problem with gun violence is rooted in children driving BMWs and using credit cards, a nation incongruous with the poverty of this population. In addition, the U.S. Department of Health tells us that death by firearm is the second leading cause of death among youth 9 to 14, a group that cannot legally drive or obtain credit cards.
According to the author, if only women would stop trying to "skirt mom responsibility," issues of gun control would be obsolete. Perhaps if women returned to the home, relinquished work for pay, and embraced the "back to the basics" approach Simmons advocates, gun violence among youth would disappear.
However systematic oppression has led to one woman being brutalized every 14 seconds by a domestic partner in this country. To stifle the voices of women by denying them opportunity will only lead to further oppression and victimization. With savage domestic abuse as a model for our children, how can a culture of violence go away?
Aimee Dawson
4021 Lenox Road
Don't blame guns
I have no fault with the mom's march on Washington because of guns and killing kids and people. But to blame a gun is like blaming a pencil for what is written and like blaming the pen for writing the Communist Manifesto!
Have not these moms given any thought to the mores of this greedy and predatory mentality of this new age in which we now live! What's behind this road rage that is now roaming around in this society? Is it the same stuff that is making kids kill other kids and themselves? Guns are not the killers; it is the confused and unhappy minds of the ones who pull the triggers. More thought should be given to the greed, politics and competition and other customs and rules of our social group!
I've just read that according to a study of college students, playing violent video games can increase aggressive behavior!
More thought should be given to what causes the mind to give command to the finger that pulls the trigger! You know that there were no guns when Cain killed Able! But nonetheless one of them was killed!
P.J. Miller
190 Parnell St.
Munford
Totalitarians can be on left or right
In response to C.E. Heaps' June 8 letter, I am sure he would be surprised to learn and I am sure disappointed to know that Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were in fact Fascists. They did not employ socialism (even though the term is found in the Nazi party name), in fact they targeted Socialists and Communists, who were the first killed by Hitler when he came to power in Germany and even though Mussolini was at one time a socialist he soon abandoned his beliefs and then targeted Socialists early in his political career.
True, while totalitarian socialist and communist governments have killed countless lives, let's not forget the pro-U.S. dictators who were allegedly democratic like Chile's Augusto Pinocet, South Korea's
Syngman Rhee and the Reza Shah Pahlavi of Iran who with the diplomatic support of the United States killed more political opponents and challengers than the socialist regimes of Fidel Castro, the Sandinista government of Nicaragua and the communist government of Vietnam combined.
I believe what Heaps is responding to are the evils of totalitarianism, no matter the political ideology, which is hard to disagree with. Unfortunately he is still caught in the 1950s McCarthyism red-baiting propaganda. Where everything considered liberal is communist, therefore evil. Since Hitler and Mussolini were also the epitome of evil they themselves must be socialist/liberals as well. This logic would be laughable if it were not actually sad. The problem Heaps and others who support his thinking have is not with the "liberal" media, but with a complete ignorance of history, philosophy, humanity and the world around them.
Before anyone starts throwing stones and passing judgments, put down the broad brush which paints all liberals as evil and in a worldwide conspiracy against democracy and instead pick up a credible book and learn the facts so in discourse one would not miss something so elementary as to where socialism and fascism are located on the political spectrum, and in turn not see things as black and white; liberals are bad, conservatives are good.
Robert Cassanello, assistant professor of history
Miles College
P. O. Box 3800
Disciples
This past week I read that the Southern Baptist Convention will vote not to ordain women for ministry. How sad this must be for the thousands of women for whom God has chosen to do great and mighty things for him. This puts such a fear of God in me for those who are doing this thing that I almost shutter.
What I am about to say was taught me by Dr. Preston Bailey, a Southern Baptist pastor in Montgomery. For many years, I had an abuse ministry for women on television, in the Montgomery County Jail and in Julia Tutwiler Prison. Every week I made the trip to Tutwiler along with other women who felt led of the Lord to go. The husband of one of these ladies forbade her to go for three weeks and one evening their doorbell rang and as her husband went to the door a stranger pulled a gun and shot him five times. He died instantly.
When Dr. Bailey heard of this, he said, "He sinned a sin unto death." This man messed with God's plan. God has made it so plain in 1 Corinthians 14:34 that women are to keep silent in the church, so says the law."
Must I remind anyone that we no longer live under the Law, When you take this one step further in Galatians 5 we read that if we are justified by the Law, there is no more grace.
I know of women who have been whipped with belts and forced to submit to this letter of the Law. This is not hearsay. I have made pictures of the belt marks on a pastor's wife. When I read my Bible and see what a wonderful loving father we have and knowing what great things Jesus did for all of us, I can understand all the women like the woman at the well, the Mary Magdlenes, the Esthers, the Deborahs who want an opportunity to be set free to serve him.
The fivefold ministry of Apostles, Prophets, Evangelist, pastors & teachers of Christ are in you ladies to win and train up his people. You are his disciples like Dorcas.
Dimple McInvale
210 David's Way
Georgiana
OTHER VIEWS Bush, Gore should consider lawyer-therapist impact
By GEORGE F. WILL
WASHINGTON POST WRITERS GROUP
WASHINGTON — The contest between Al Gore and George Bush for the office of national school superintendent means Washington will expand its role in education. Until the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the federal government had essentially nothing — certainly nothing essential — to do with elementary and secondary education.
In May Gore endorsed a good idea, "alternative educational settings" — special "second chance schools" — for expelled children. However, one reason such schools are needed is that the federal government has complicated the task of maintaining school discipline. To understand how this happened, see "Who Killed School Discipline?" by Kay S. Hymowitz in City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute.
Because schools reflect the families from which the pupils come, school discipline was bound to worsen as more broken families resulted in more troubled or badly reared children. And maintaining order was bound to become more difficult as popular culture became a sensory blitzkrieg of promptings to sexual and other self-assertions by adolescents. However, government has made matters worse.
In 1969 the Supreme Court held that a school violated five students' constitutional rights when it suspended them for wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam War. Thus did important matters of school discipline become federal cases. Thereafter, a principal who confronted, say, a student wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with "White Power" or with a swastika had to construe the Constitution. Could the principal prove that the behavior was "significantly disruptive"? Did he want to litigate the question?
In 1975, in a case concerning students suspended for fighting, the court expanded students' due process rights, holding that students have a property right to their education. So lawyers and judges were pulled even deeper into school discipline procedures, presiding over — at a minimum — elaborate hearings with witnesses. Designed to make schools more "fair" and "responsive," such decisions, writes Hymowitz, made school administrators act defensively and look legalistic and obtuse:
"When a New York City high school student came to school with a metal-spiked ball whose sole purpose could only be to maim classmates, he wasn't suspended: Metal-spiked balls weren't on the superintendent's detailed list of proscribed weapons. Suspend him and he might sue you for being arbitrary and capricious.
"Worse, the influence of lawyers over school discipline means that educators speak to children in an unrecognizable language, far removed from the straight talk about right and wrong that most children crave. ... Students correctly sense that what lies behind such desiccated language is not a moral worldview and a concern for their well-being and character but fear of lawsuits."
What also lies behind it is the therapeutic impulse.
In 1975 Congress passed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which requires schools to provide disabled children an "appropriate" education within regular classrooms whenever that is possible. The act addressed real needs of many mentally and physically handicapped students. But since, and partly because of, the passage of the act, there has been, as Hymowitz says, an explosive growth in the number of children classified under vague disability categories such as "learning disability" and "emotional disturbance."
Part of the legal definition of emotional disturbance is "an inability to build or maintain satisfactory interpersonal relationships with peers and teachers." So children who are unruly, for whatever reason, can claim — and litigate for — protected status within schools that, before 1975, would have had a freer hand to expel them.
The IDEA arrived just as society was becoming suffused with the therapeutic impulse, which de-emphasizes free will and moral responsibility, and postulates social or physiological causes of behavior. This engenders a search for pharmacological treatments, or such therapeutic "remedies" as role-playing games, breathing exercises and learning to "identify feelings" and "manage anger." What Hymowitz calls "the skittish avoidance of moral language" by the therapeutically inclined indicates an enthusiasm for behavioral techniques and an aversion to "inducting children into moral consciousness."
If School Superintendent Gore or Bush wants school discipline that arises from a moral environment that socializes children, he should consider how schools stopped being moral communities and became cockpits for lawyers and playgrounds for therapists.
George F. Will can be reached 1150 15th St. Northwest, Washington, D.C. 20071-9200
LOOK BACK From Birmingham Post-Herald files:
50 years ago, June 15, 1950: Birmingham's city records, destroyed by flood in 1949 and by fire in 1925, will now be housed in fire- and floodproof concrete block warehouse.
Fifty people are killed and 200 injured as rebel forces revolt against Peru's military government.
25 years ago, June 15, 1975: University of Alabama President F. David Mathews, 39, accepts President Ford's appointment to Cabinet post of secretary of health, education and welfare, succeeding Caspar Weinberger and becoming youngest member of Cabinet.
Senate committee uncovers evidence linking CIA to assassinations of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo and South Vietnamese Premier Ngo Dinh Diem.
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