Who’s afraid of opera?
Re: “Lesson rouses devil of a debate,” Jan. 29 news story.
Should any teacher be excoriated for introducing her students to one of the most oft-told legends in Western culture (“Faust”), especially when it’s told with hand puppets?
Bennett school officials should take immediate responsibility and lay out clearer guidelines about what are acceptable videos and stories to use as educational materials – and be sure all teachers are aware of them. Would the 1940s “Fantasia” be appropriate for a public school showing? (It contains a cartoon devil followed by the playing of the famous “Ave Maria.”) Can a teacher read “Cinderella” or “Snow White”? (There are witches, sibling abuse, poisoned fruit, and magic.) If a teacher does read such a story, how responsible is that teacher to an angry parent or frightened second-grader?
Superintendent George Sauter is quoted as saying, “We want to expose kids to things, to help them see there is another world besides Bennett out there.” Considering how Tresa Waggoner has been treated, how does Sauter expect that to happen?
Michael Mastronicola, Instructor of Music, Front Range Community College, Westminster
Timothy Snyder, Artistic Director, Boulder Chorale
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I have a quick question for the parents in Bennett who objected to the “Who’s Afraid of Opera?” segment played in class: Do you also object to Disney’s “The Lion King”? If not, I consider your religious objection to Tresa Waggoner’s lesson to be a comical double standard. Evidently it is more acceptable for your children to view an uncle who murders his brother and convinces the child he was responsible for his father’s death, thus sentencing the child to a lifetime of guilt, than it is to view a “silhouette” of a murder and “an allusion to suicide.” If you do object to “The Lion King,” then you are at least consistent.
I commend innovative teachers who, despite possible outcries from the religious right, give children the opportunity to learn in different ways and make up their own minds.
Jeff Leone, Aurora
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The Post brought up an important issue in its lighthearted approach to the “conservative” response that Bennett parents gave to a children’s introduction to the opera “Faust.” Yet no one involved in the article seemed to be able to point the finger at the bull in the china shop when the dishes are broken. What was labeled as “conservative” in an overly polite way is really the twin devils of superstition and ignorance. Because such parents fail to culturally educate their children at home, and instead paint them a small world of fairy tale characters as real, it’s no wonder their children would be traumatized by art, fiction or science from the broader society. That’s the parents’ fault and they should feel embarrassed, not indignant.
Instead of apologizing, the school should make culture classes available to such parents to help them think more reasonably and understand their cultural heritage better. This could let both parties cooperate in having a more positive effect on their children’s formative years.
Erik Moore, Denver
White Americans in the NBA
Re: “Fading from the game; White Americans are being squeezed out of the NBA,” Jan. 29 sports story.
Your story was puzzling because the headlines inferred that changes in the National Basketball Association were disproportionately affecting white Americans. But in fair and balanced terms, this clearly is not true.
The NBA data in the article showed that the number of international players increased from 21 to 82 between 1991 and 2006. At the same time, the number of “white Americans” in the NBA declined from 85 to 48, meaning that as international players gained 61 jobs over 15 years, “white Americans” were squeezed out of 37 jobs.
Unmentioned was that African-American men lost 24 NBA jobs during the same period. Because there are 113 million white American men and 19 million African-American men in the U.S. today, this means that in proportionate terms, African-American men lost more than four times the jobs lost by white men. Therefore, one in every 3 million white American men and one in every 650,000 African-American men have been “squeezed out” of the NBA by international players since 1991. But the article dealt only with white Americans.
In light of the realities of demography and skin color in the United States, the headlines and article make sense only if one defines the NBA data in terms of a “color-blind white male perspective.” This sense-making perspective is widely used and often causes white men to feel that they are victims of contemporary trends. But if we drop the pretense of color blindness and see the data in a fair and balanced manner, it is obvious that the influx of international players in the NBA has a much more dramatic negative affect on African-American men than it has on white men.
Jay Coakley, Fort Collins
State seat-belt law
Re: “Seat-belt law wouldn’t help,” Jan. 29 Ed Quillen column.
I would like to commend Ed Quillen for always wearing his seat belt and requiring passengers in his motor vehicle to buckle up. However, his thought process on the proposed primary seat-belt measure is flawed. In state after state, when a primary seat-belt law is passed, motor vehicle fatalities have decreased an average of 10 to 15 percent, and seat-belt usage increased by approximately the same amount. That means that in 2005 there would have been about 50 to 75 fewer grieving families in our state.
As a father who lost a son in a motor vehicle accident, I will never know if a primary seat-belt law would have saved my son, but I would have liked to have had the opportunity to know. I am also sure that there are about 50 to 75 unsuspecting families in this state whose spirits will not be darkened this year if the legislature passes this bill.
For those who lose a loved one this way, the grief and heartache may dull over time, but it never goes away.
Leo Jodoin, Greeley
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Ed Quillen’s belittling of the proposed safety-belt law ignores the very positive empirical data on safety-belt use. Obviously such a law will not automatically cause compliance or prevent bad outcomes in every single case, but over time it will effectively reduce the number of fatal accidents and severe injuries, as it has done everywhere else. It’s not about Quillen driving to the dumpster, it’s about the millions of people in traffic, encountering dangerous situations thousands of times at any given moment.
Changing the odds in the survival statistics is the only meaningful way to “make our roads safer,” to quote Quillen’s final line.
Martin Voelker, Golden
Girl Scout cookie sales
Re: “Cookie-sale commandos hit the streets,” Jan. 29 news story.
As a lifelong Girl Scout, I took great interest in your article, and found it to be upbeat and positive, except for some of the comments about marketing of the cookies. You quoted Margaret Campbell, a marketing professor, as saying that “the young scouts are free labor used to fund multimillion-dollar programs.” Of course they are! There are several reasons for this.
First, selling cookies teaches girls many life skills – marketing, money and time management, goal setting, and so on.
Second, the girls benefit directly from the money earned, both on the troop level and council level. Girl Scouts offers many low-cost or free programs to its girls, so many that leaders have a tough time deciding what they should offer the girls. Girl Scouts does not discriminate based on one’s ability to pay for programs. If a girl cannot pay for her dues, uniform, or to go to camp, all they have to do is ask for help and the local council will help as much as fiscally possible. No girl is ever turned away because she can’t pay – unlike countless other children’s programs. Cookie sales provide the funds to do the above.
Lastly, Girl Scouts receives substantially less of its operating funds from donations than organizations catering to boys do. Organizations for girls are every bit as important as those for boys, but thanks to social mores, we girls have to do more of our own funding.
Cathy Masters, Highlands Ranch
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A mile-high salute to the Girl Scouts’ Mile Hi Council on their successful marketing of children and their parents to sell their multimillion-dollar-a-year cookie sales. I’m particularly impressed with the entrepreneurship of Linda Peterson, mother of a Girl Scout from Parker, who takes phone numbers from customers’ personal checks at their booth sales so that her daughter can sell directly to those customers next year. Privacy concerns are for the other guy! After all, to quote Peterson’s daughter, “The more I sell, the happier I’ll be.”
Deborah Nowak, Arvada
NSA’s warrantless wiretaps: Is President Bush breaking the law?
Re: “Bush may be in ‘zone of twilight,”‘ Jan. 29 John Aloysius Farrell column.
Quoting the Congressional Research Service, John Aloysius Farrell reports that, in the absence of a definitive Supreme Court decision, the earlier ruling in the case Hamdi vs. Rumsfeld may actually give the president authority “to conduct anywhere in the world, including within the United States, any activity that can be characterized as a fundamental incident of waging war.”
If this line of reasoning should prevail, it would mean that there is no effective limit on the mind-set of war which has characterized this particular administration from the get-go. Have we so soon forgotten the missing WMDs, which provided us with our main reason for invading Iraq in the first place? Have we not learned from bitter experience that, when people are in the grip of a mind-set such as “war,” their perception becomes extremely selective as well as distorted?
Joel Brence, Aspen
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The English poet William Blake wrote in “Auguries of Innocence,” “A truth that’s told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.” John Aloysius Farrell’s “truth,” and that of many of his colleagues in the liberal media, is that George W. Bush sanctioned and the National Security Administration carried out a vast plan to “eavesdrop on American citizens without first obtaining court orders.” This broad, untrue statement that Bush and the NSA are “eavesdropping,” through illegal wiretaps, is hammered on daily now in every conceivable news venue. It is known that the NSA eavesdropping on Americans is limited to those “Americans” who are linked to known terrorists, including al-Qaeda, and to phone calls that these terrorists initiate to contacts in the U.S. from outside the U.S., whether citizens or aliens who are erroneously all lumped together by the media and conveniently labeled “Americans.”
Why would our brilliant stewards of precision and clarity in the press promote what truly amounts to propaganda (a piece of truth refashioned into a lie), when it would be a far greater service to its readers to accurately describe exactly what the NSA is doing?
William Brunhofer, Denver
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President Bush’s defense for spying on American citizens is that he needs this weapon to protect the country from terrorists. This argument is another example of how the president manipulates public opinion by twisting the terms of debate until it’s nearly impossible to disagree. The core issue is not whether the president should defend us aggressively against terrorists, and it’s not whether domestic surveillance should be one of his tools. When it passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, Congress agreed that domestic spying is sometimes justified. But Congress imposed a safeguard to ensure that surveillance is not abused. It required the president to first secure a wiretap warrant. The real issue is whether the war on terrorism allows a president to become unaccountable to the public, the law and the Constitution he swore to uphold.
Mary Becker, Golden
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President Bush tried to justify his spying on American citizens by saying the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act law, which he broke, is outdated. He said the world has changed a lot since 1978, implying the law is irrelevant today. Judging by his actions, this is exactly how he views the U.S. Constitution. Bush should be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors.
Evan Eisentrager, Boulder
Global warming
Re: “Bush out of step on warming,” Jan. 29 editorial.
So, 2005 was the hottest year in the last 100. Why? “No one can be sure why” – The Post’s own words. Exactly. No one can be sure. No matter how many studies are issued, and no matter how many former Environmental Protection Agency bureaucrats are on board, so-called proof of a warming spiral attributable to human-generated greenhouse gases remains unconvincing.
Besides, we have no assurance that substantial cuts in U.S. emissions would make even a significant dent in the global atmospheric greenhouse gas load.
Shall we “Kyoto” the U.S. economy anyway? What will the repercussions be for the poor? And who will say, “Oops – my bad,” if we are wrong?
David John Rippe, Cheyenne
Sports vs. academics
By the time letter-writer Frank Kroznicki ended his petulant whining about the newspaper “nincompoops” who support such an “irrelevant activity” as sports, he actually posed a very good question. He asked: “Why not dedicate an entire page a day to the fine young people who excel at academics?” Well, Mr. Kroznicki, they do: It’s called the business section.
Mike Durcan, Denver
The volunteer spirit
Re: “‘Volunteer’? Just do what needs doing,” Jan. 29 Style essay.
Sureva Towler mourns the spirit of the Old West, gut shot by rich “Newbies” in ivory “McCastles” writing checks to causes for which they have no passion. These interlopers should roll up their sleeves and do what needs doing – or get the heck out of Dodge.
Sometimes what needs doing is writing a check. Hard as I tug on my bootstraps, I can’t make new hot water heaters appear out of thin air for the non- profit I help run. New computers were donated to our program, and a volunteer rolled up his sleeves and installed them. Passion and participation generate only so much cash. We stretch dollars so far they practically snap out of our hands when we part with them.
Rarely does anyone throw money at us from afar. In the Real West, folks who write big checks are pretty discerning about where they put their money, and they’re as individual as the causes they embrace. Some are fifth- generation ranchers, some got here last week on the tech rocket. Some folks want to eat casserole at a picnic table, some prefer sipping champagne at a black-tie fundraiser.
The spirit of the West lives. Barn raisings still happen. Some folks pay for the wood, some wield a hammer and push up the walls. Some folks do both. The barn gets built either way.
Sue Schafer, Program Director, Boys Hope Girls Hope of Colorado, Denver
TO THE POINT: Short takes from readers
Colorado Ski Country USA is offering all fifth-graders in Colorado a passport to ski free at 24 Colorado resorts this season, three times at each. This is a great! But did anyone consider the weekend traffic impact on Interstate 70?
K.J. Hickey, Denver
Since President Bush says we must break our addiction to oil, then he should be the first in line at the ethanol clinic.
Frank Slavick, Superior
Daniel Weiss of Focus on the Family claims that prostitution “hinges on the notion that human beings are commodities to be bought, sold, used and discarded.” To me, that characterization seems equally apt for corporate America.
Ross E. Kahn, Denver
So, the politicians want to ban pit bulls. Personally I’d rather keep the dogs and ban the politicians.
G.L. Draus, Highlands Ranch
Regarding Terrell Owens, Broncos coach Mike Shanahan must subscribe to the theory that if one picks up enough lottery tickets from the gutter, one of them is bound to be a winner.
Carrie Ann Lucas, Denver
I only hope that someday I, too, will be wealthy enough to be able to buy, as Exxon Mobil Corp. can, ads in newspapers read from coast to coast to inform the world that I’m not actually as wealthy as I appear to be.
Don Anderson, Denver
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