Letters
Social welfare helps foster poverty
It’s a shame Mike Schwartz in his article "Welfare reform takes
money, livelihood from poor people" (Viewpoint, April 5) doesn’t
understand what many of us do. The only way to prevent selfish
adults from knowingly – and this is important – knowingly bringing
children into abject poverty is to limit welfare benefits.
How long can hardworking taxpayers make their 9-to-5 while, in
New York City, "advocates" sit by as 16-year-old girls are placed
into subsidized apartments?
What kind of world does Schwartz envision, where children raise
children – only to see those children fill our prisons and
shelters.
What does Schwartz care if generations of black and brown people
are stuck in a welfare cycle and public housing, endowed with no
skills and no education?
Why should Schwartz care if our cities crumble as the tax base
shrinks and social service spending soars?
He can make allusions to student loans, grants and mortgage tax
breaks as "welfare," but that sneaky red herring will never
resonate with the American people – we know what we mean by ending
welfare: we encourage home ownership and advanced education, while
discouraging splintered families and irresponsible social
engineering.
Schwartz should do his research: for the first time in America,
we have more minorities on welfare than whites, far exceeding their
percentage of the general population. This would be irrelevant, but
Schwartz wants to score points with his divisive color
arguments.
Schwartz and I do agree on one issue: corporate welfare should
be trimmed away as much as possible, though, corporations, unlike
welfare mooches, give something to the community – be it jobs,
products or services.
Oh yeah, and they pay taxes, too.
Jeff Abelson
New York City resident
Atrocities in Kosovo necessitate action
In his recent column, "U.S. action in Kosovo harms, not helps"
(Viewpoint, April 7), Jonah Lalas complains of Clinton’s
"misleading" comparison of Slobodan Milosevic to Adolf Hitler. But
he perpetuates his own misleading comparison by likening the
current conflict in Kosovo to the Vietnam War.
The truth is, both analogies serve only to falsely simplify what
is a decidedly complex situation.
Lalas asks, "What exactly are our national interests in the
region?" as if to suggest that without national interests we have
no right to interfere in the affairs of a sovereign nation.
But the question of rights can be recast as a question of
obligations: "What obligations do we Americans, as human beings,
have toward other human beings?"
Ignoring the plight of the Kosovar Albanians is tantamount to
ignoring the domestic violence occurring in the apartment next
door. Sure I could say, "It’s none of my business," but I couldn’t
help feeling ashamed of that response.
Lalas and others rightly point out that the United States has
remained silent during past human rights abuses in Tibet, Africa,
East Timor and elsewhere. I cannot excuse this inconsistency in
U.S. foreign policy.
But the United States’ past failings cannot be construed as a
precedent for inaction in the face of future atrocities.
The United States has the authority to intervene in the affairs
of another country in order to prevent human rights abuses; and so
do Russia, Great Britain, China, Guatemala – even Serbia.
I can only wish that some foreign power had stepped in to stop
our wholesale eradication of Native Americans, or our universally
intolerable treatment of African Americans through most of the 20th
century. To remain silent in the face of evil is complicity an
evil.
Lalas may be correct in suggesting that the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) intervention has backfired, accelerating
the "ethnic cleansing" rather than stalling it. But alternatives
are in short supply.
Sanctions and the "bad public relations" strategy advocated by
Lalas would simply take too long to take effect. Action, even if it
ultimately proves ineffective, is essential, if only so we can say
that we didn’t sit idly by while hundreds of thousands of Kosovar
Albanians were persecuted and murdered.
For once (thank God) we can say "We tried."
Dan Connolly
Graduate student
Film