27
March 2012
Letters Please send letters to oped@voicesweb.org Dear Voices, I must say I find offense in the article by Toby Carlson, February 2012, “The Frightening Trend of Racial Code Words”. I am Tea Party. I am highly educated, Catholic, and a historian. Mr. Carlson's assumptions are absolutely incorrect. He points to urban vs. rural, old vs. new, and takes class or station in life as his premise. It is obvious that he has not studied history or been paying attention to current events. As a Tea Party member, I and others only want the country to be what is founded on: personal responsibilty with limited government. Our Constitution is the greastest document in the world, and our founders' vision was not just for their time, but for all time. This administration has shredded that document beyond belief (i.e. Obamacare, school lunch policy, spending without consent, class warfare, higher taxes, avoiding the checks and balances of the system.) It is time to put the country back on track by ending extended entitlements and putting people back to work, by securing our border, by allowing only legal immigration, and by letting the individual decide what is right for them. Socialism doesn't work. History has proven that over and over again. Let our Contitutional Republic be as intended, and America will be the shining star as it should be to the rest of the world. John L. Flickinger State College [Ed. Because we love a good debate between friends, we extended an invitation to Mr. Carlson to reply to Mr. Flickinger. The response is found below.]
Dear Voices, Voting habits of urban-liberal versus rural-conservative are well documented. Take Pennsylvania, for example: 16 of the most populous counties, plus cosmopolitan Centre County, voted for Obama in 2008. The remaining 50 or so counties, predominantly rural, voted for Mc Cain. This pattern was evident to me locally during 2008 when I counted the number of Obama versus McCain signs on people’s lawns while driving from State College to rural Millheim. Mr. Flickinger, like the Tea Party folks, expresses nostalgia for a lost America, the once and future “city on the hill.” But when was this golden age? Before the Civil War, when slavery existed? Before the 1920s, when women could not vote? Before Social Security was created in the 1930s? Before the Civil Rights bills were passed in the 1950s? Before Medicare was instituted in the 1960s? Before the clean water and clean air acts were passed by President Nixon in the 1970s? Are we to now assume that because President Obama wanted 40 million more Americans to have better health care that this country has slipped into decline? What kind of morality is this? The Tea Party may sense a decline in this country but I feel that the United States is a better country now than it was a century or even a generation ago. I think, moreover, that the Tea Party people tend to use the word “socialism” to refer to things they do not like or approve of. The Oxford dictionary definition hardly applies to contemporary America, let alone Europe. Toby Carlson State College
ASK Cosmo
Dear Cosmo, Have you noticed the increase of ads for internet dating services? They’ve got them for regular people, and senior citizens, and now there are ones especially for religious people. There’s Christianmingle.com for Christians and J-Date for Jews. I don’t know about Muslims. Are people more lonely today, or is this just another hi-tech industry hunting for people with computers? Do these things actually even work? Signed, Possible Player Dear Playing With Matches, First off, religious people qualify as regular people, don’t they? So do Muslims (on both counts). And by the way, there are plenty of Muslim dating sites. In addition to the subsets in the major franchises like E-harmony.com, Zoosk.com, and Match.com, there are individual sites such as SingleMuslim.com or ArabLounge.com. Wouldn’t it be awesome if their site music was “Girl from Ipanima” played on an Oud? Interestingly enough, ChristianMingle and J-Date are both operated by Spark.com, who proudly proclaims, “Combining the power of technology with our deep commitment to your happiness, our specialized Web sites aim to
Campus and Culture from the Canine Perspective
provide a fun and convenient meeting point for millions of singles each year.” So no, they’re not merely hunting for people with computers. They’re looking for specific people with specific demographics who want to hook up with folks of the same demographics. Apparently, the lonely devout are not meeting one another at church, temple or mosque, so why not—in the name of their happiness—sell them the ability to peek under the wimple, veil or burka on the intra-faith internet. A small sample of Spark.com’s lofty cruising zones includes the following dotcoms: AdventistSingles, AsianSingles, BlackSingles and BlackChristianSingles, CanadianPersonals, CatholicMingle, DeafSingles, GreekSingles, LatinSingles, MilitarySingles, InterracialSingles, LDSSingles (for the Mormons) and even the IndianMatrimonynetwork (perhaps to arrange a marriage the modern way). Unlike their many heathen counterparts, Spark sites like Christianmingle.com do not offer drop-down menus for men seeking men, or women seeking women. These folks have to drop down to the a la carte sites, of which there is no shortage. However, persons on such sites may not be what they appear to be. “HotTeen16” might be a 45 year-old man, “Little Lovely” might be a female Sumo, and “Ready4U” might be an NBC Dateline reporter casting an episode of “To Catch a Predator.” And “Sad Bachelor” might be some married dude sniffing around the fencerows to do a little extracurricular hoodwinking.
see
Cosmo, pg. 31