Terrorism: a poor excuse
Your September 28 issue’s lead story “All the news that’s fit to gag,” about media “self-censoring,” is one of the most substantive pieces I have seen in print anywhere the past year. Thanks for kicking it over on Big Media, whose working press foot-soldiers are either asleep at the wheel or being ordered by management that essentially is being bought off by politicians and corporations not to cover the real stories.
The No. 1 story you report as being untold is that wealth inequality in the 21st century threatens economy and democracy. Your segment concludes, “While we fight the ‘war on terror’ we are neglecting a much greater threat to world stability: poverty.” The issue you are calling our attention to is genuine and massive, but your summation misses the point. If we convince ourselves that explosions and violence in Palestine, Chechnya, Sudan, Pakistan and Kashmir or even horrors like the 9/11 attacks are simply the work of religious terror-extremists, we are allowing discrete symptoms to distract our attention from poverty in the developing world, the actual pandemic.
The 1 billion-plus citizens of the Muslim world experience a far greater abyss between haves and have-nots than we do in the United States. The extreme poverty of this sector’s majority is approaching the point where self-immolation via suicide bombing becomes a creative antidote to an insanity-making form of hopelessness. Terrorism is not different or separate from poverty. Terrorism is simply poverty’s voice.
Until our policy makers can imagine a better gift to the developing world than an increased Pentagon budget, we should expect that voice to get much louder in the next decade or so.
Freeman Allan
Crozet
The ires of march
I found the reference to the UVA Marching Band in the How To section [“How to endure the UVA Marching Band, October 5] to be quite offensive and mean spirited. Those who have never been successful in marching band often degrade something they do not understand. Members of the better bands can do things that I, a musician for nearly 50 years, envy, and that is memorize not one, but multiple pieces of music. On top of that, they have to learn multiple drills (those are the field formations) that involve, depending on the show, 30 to 100 separate moves.
As to the writer’s game and half-time antics: Go ahead and pull out your Maker’s Mark, or whatever rot-gut you choose. Thanks to idiots like you, my janitorial crew has to pick up thousands of those miniature bottles after every home game. For every dollar you spend on that crap, you could support that Pep Band you so crave to have in attendance.
And, yes, I am a parent of a member of the UVA Marching Band. Do me a favor and stay home on game day.
Deborah Buchanan
Charlottesville
Mother load
Rumors abound around election time, and rumors often get started for political reasons. And from there they are sometimes broadcast as “facts.” Take the so-called “fact” that American mothers, after hearing about the tragedy of the Russian school children, decided America is “safer” under Bush [“The Mom factor,” Right Turn, October 5]. This can only be a rumor, and a wrong one at that.
I personally doubt that American mothers who hear of children being killed anywhere in the world as the result of terrorism don’t think first of the families who lost them. I also doubt that very many mothers don’t know that terrorism has no boundaries. We have certainly had it in our own country. This rumor/”fact” is an insult to American mothers.
Audrey H. Michie
Charlottesville
CORRECTION
In the September 21 cover story “Eat Your Heart Out,” we printed an incorrect address for the Blue Ridge Country Store. It is actually located at 518 E. Main St., on the Downtown Mall.