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DOING WHAT WE CAN The end of a year is a time to reflect. This year has been full of change and information. The good news is people woke up to the Bush administration's devastating war on Iraq and showed it in the November elections. People are also waking up, thanks in great part to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth documentary, about the very real and threatening climate change crisis. My concern is not so much for humans but all the other species that have no say in this catastrophe that humans are causing. We have an obligation to do whatever we can to help slow and stop climate change. The average citizen can cut his or her energy usage by 70 percent and not affect lifestyle. There are two meetings scheduled to discuss what we can do in Lane County, the "Lane County Energy Round Up" public forums. The first is Tuesday, Jan. 23 at Harris Hall on the UO campus. The second is Tuesday, Feb 27. On the local level, we can accomplish much. Let's help turn the tide in 2007 towards healing, love and unity. May ALL beings be free from suffering. Pamela Driscoll, Eugene
A TRUE SERVICE I want to thank Suzi Steffen for including our family in the article (12/21) on lesbian families and The Register-Guard's narrow-minded and discriminating policy in disallowing same-sex birth announcements. And I want to set the record "straight." While we were one of the first lesbian families in the state of Oregon (Multnomah County, January, 1994) to accomplish a same-sex, second-parent adoption, we certainly know that we were not the first lesbians in Eugene to have a baby. We know several families who have children much older than our daughter born in 1992. These families, through their visibility as lesbians having children — then and now a courageous act, even in Eugene — helped us know that having a baby was a positive, thrilling, joyous step toward familial fulfillment. Because our announcement was printed in the R-G, it was so very heartwarming for me, having been born here, to hear from old acquaintances who wouldn't have received a personal birth announcement congratulating us on our new baby. Here's hoping the Bakers will realize, sooner than later, that this is a true community service. Karm Hagedorn , Eugene
MORE DEADLY So folks are anticipating the unfortunate arrival of the 3,000th U.S. death in Iraq. Excuse me while I abstain from the mourning, since I have bigger death tallies on my mind; many more people are killed by automobiles every four weeks (43,443 deaths and 2.7 million injuries in 2005). At least the enlistees are aware that they'll be putting themselves in a dangerous position. I don't think you can say the same the next time you buckle your child into his seat in your car on the way to the store. Jeffrey Stout, Eugene
MORE TREEHOUSES The approach of 2007 has me reflecting a bit and thinking about wishes for myself and my community in the coming year. I wish for more optimism and less pessimism, more hope and less fear, more love and less hate, more greenery and less concrete, more patience and less hurried anxiety, more peace and less war, more bicycles and fewer cars, more passion and less apathy, more laughs and fewer frowns, more joy and less worry, more handwritten letters and fewer emails, more understanding and less judging, more listening and less talking, more clean air and less pollution. I don't wish for much, eh? Ha ha! I also wish for more open displays of loving and caring emotions and less worrying what others will think, more honesty and acknowledging that we are not perfect and less caring whether we might look weak or wimpy, more treehouses and fewer houses, more friends and fewer strangers, more play and less work, more acts of kindness and fewer expressions of anger, more quiet calmness and less loud frenzy, more social gatherings and less TV, more creativity and less standardization, more slow simplicity and less frantic chaos, more bird songs and fewer cell phone calls, more laughing at ourselves and less taking ourselves too seriously. More new beginnings and fewer ends. The end! Tim Boyden, Eugene
FORCING VIEWS I would ask Alby Thoumsin (letters, 12/21) and others who feel that the eco-arsonists are being unfairly persecuted whether he feels the same way about pro-life extremists who burn down abortion clinics. After all, these pro-lifers feel in their hearts that they are doing the right thing to protect human life. They feel that they have right on their side, that society is not listening and that they must take direct action to stop the evil that they perceive. And, if Thoumsin does not agree that the pro-life arsonists are being persecuted, then why not? After all, who will be the judge about righteousness? I will. I don't want any self-righteous know-it-all to use violence (yes, arson is violence) to force his or her views on me. If you feel that your righteous cause is not getting traction then it is probably because people don't agree with you. Burning things up is a piss-poor response to that. Grow up and get over yourself. We don't need you to save us. The eco-arsonists and abortion clinic arsonists deserve every minute of their long prison sentences. They should share the same cells. They are no different from each other. Randy Kolb, Eugene
MYTH BUSTING I am delighted with the Weekly's decision to remove sexually explicit photographs from the escort advertisements. Does this represent a conscious change in policy? I hope so! I had given up hope that the Weekly would acknowledge the disrespect communicated by the portrayals of women in sexually humiliating or vulnerable positions. Women are beautiful and have every right to do whatever they choose with their bodies, but the preponderance of photographs in the Weekly advertisements reinforced negative myths about women. These myths teach us all, through constant repetition, that women are objects to be dominated and exploited, rather than being the authors of their own biographies. Like Mark Roberts, I believe what we see in the media plants ideas in the subconscious. To learn more about this, check out Tough Guise or the Killing Us Softly series, films that explore the messages concealed in broad daylight in the mass media. Better yet, watch them with your adolescent children (screen first to make sure you are comfortable with the material). I used both when educating teens about healthy relationships for several years in local middle and high schools. And more props to the Weekly for the beautiful birth announcements! Rose Wilde, Eugene
PURITY TEST I've had it with Vip Short's (12/14) sanctimonious letters. Dude is a great guy but I am gonna fight him to the rhetorical death. The issue? His penchant for talking trash about aspects of the fight for a better world that don't meet his personal litmus test of purity. First off, the Gandhi worship. Take a lesson from Gandhi, Vip — avoid condemning the more militant aspects of our struggle. The Indian anti-colonial movement included assassinations and bombings. The actions of the Green Scare defendants look like a tea party in comparison. Yet Gandhi kept his cool, always bringing the issue back to WHY — why are people this frustrated? He didn't waste time writing letters about how wrong those actions were. Secondly, Vip's privileged concept of nonviolence irks me. The people who were part of Gandhi's resistance movement practiced MILITANT nonviolence. They shut down factories, ports and other strategic targets, and they were beaten and killed for doing so. Their lives and the lives of their children depended on that resistance. It's a far cry from the pure symbolism of crossing some invisible line and going to jail so you can feel like you've done something. When Vip's crew gets together and stops a military supply train, wake me up. These are just two of the reasons why I want to cry when I see Vip attacking the actions of some of my dear friends and comrades, actions that have brought repression beyond belief. Actions that went out of their way to hurt no living thing. Actions that freed living beings. How about a Martin Luther King Jr. quote to wrap this up? "I am only effective as long as there is a shadow on white America of the black man standing behind me with a Molotov cocktail." Good luck stopping that supply train! And stop wasting your time dissing my friends. Steve Bouton, Eugene
FLESH OF THE EARTH We have been weaned off the natural world and lost touch with it. Instead, we're plugged into an increasingly artificial world that inundates us daily with thousands of manufactured, profit-driven messages relentlessly plying our emotional minds for inroads to our wallets. Daily as we wave goodbye to plant and animal species that have made the evolutionary journey with us, we slowly absorb our own pollution. Sure, corporate infrastructure will save memories of the little froggies and fishies for us — we'll be able to purchase them at the price of the destroyed habitat that was theirs in the first place, but we'll "need" the latest peripherals to view them at maximum resolution. We move, eat and sleep in an increasingly unnatural world. Railroaded at birth to be part of this systematic lifestyle. The distant scream of our dwindling natural world is lost in our own noise. We haven't learned to "create" a single material object in our crawl from the primordial slime. Rather, we have inefficiently learned very well how to take tons of the very life-giving "Earth flesh" from which we come and transform it into ounces of toxic, saleable product, which is then sold back at a profit to the mind-numbed slaves that dug it up in the first place. We are the consumers who are destroying the Earth. We, the consumers, can change that. Voluntary simplicity. Merry Christmas. Don Bojnowski, Albany
THE LAST NEO-CON I want to add my insight into why President Bush will not relent to the American public's rejection of the war on Iraq. I refer your readers to a quote from Ann Coulter written shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Speaking about the civilians in countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq, Coulter wrote: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." Mr. Bush is the last neo-con in the White House and possibly the Republican Party. It is obvious to me that he believes, as does Coulter, that the best way to deal with the civilians of the Middle East is to "invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." If anyone doubts the president's genocidal intent, consider that according to news reports on the ground at least 733,854 people have been killed and 1,406,972 seriously injured in Afghanistan and Iraq since the war on terror began. This number does not include the nearly 3,000 U.S. dead and tens of thousands injured. The time has come to either end the war in Iraq or remove George Bush and Dick Cheney from their positions of power. The president is intent on ignoring the will of the people as expressed in the last election. The next step is impeachment, conviction and removal of the president for high crimes and misdemeanors. Gerry Merritt, Eugene
THE REAL RADICAL Yes, sanctimonious Spruce ("Movement Gone Astray" Viewpoint, 12/21), YOU are the real radical, not those eco-saboteurs/anarchists who risk so much to resist the destruction of our biosphere. And it is those benighted types who create an "us vs. them" situation, not a divided society in which cops exist, most basically, to protect the rulers of this madhouse. Once again your targets reveal which side you are really on. Never, for instance, do you go after your peaceworker friends, fellow pacifists, who can never get enough of the Democratic Party, indispensable accomplice of the Killing Machine. John Zerzan, Eugene
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