Anthrax cartoon
shows poor taste
Last week you ran a cartoon in your paper (ODE, 10/19) where a person was eating some powdered donuts, and a nearby onlooker in return shouted: “Anthrax!”
Hahahaha. It is hard to believe something done with such poor taste could be shown in a daily campus newspaper, not to mention it had no comedic value whatsoever.
I expected that since the Oregon Daily Emerald is at least some sort of a newspaper, they would have known that at the time of the cartoon, one person had already died from the virus, and since then, two more people have died. Real funny stuff.
Josh Brown
junior
sociology
Fossilized dung
is better than fresh
It’s common sense that:
The University supporting a service that refuses to hire people because of gender is a violation of the University’s own non-discrimination policies.
Losing three to six residential blocks or losing the downtown hospital site to a Coburg/Crescent site is preferable to losing the hospital altogether.
A traffic-filled downtown mall is preferable to an abandoned pedestrian one.
When you make downtown a historic district, you drive new businesses away and eventually kill downtown by limiting its development. Look at Albany, Corvallis, Lebanon, etc.
A student-funded organization that doesn’t undergo an annual budget approval process is wide open to charges of fraud and abuse, regardless of whether there’s impropriety or not.
Any California team that’s having a good season will be ranked higher than any Oregon team, even though we’re better.
The odds of you catching Anthrax are infinitesimally low.
Not all war is bad. Without the American Revolution, there would be no America (as we know it), no Bill of Rights, no Constitution, no freedom anywhere — the American Revolution helped to inspire the European and Latin American ones.
Dissent and disagreement aren’t disloyalty.
Not all partisanship is bad. Without dissent, disagreement and discussion, we’d all be boring carbon copies.
Not all partisanship is good, either. Without compromise, we’d never get anything done.
Even a coprolitic daily newspaper like the Emerald, which has all of the vigor and enthusiasm of a lobotomized sloth, is better than a fecal publication like the Commentator.
Derek Ian Jones
sophomore
undeclared
Smoking marijuana
should be your choice
I am 45 years old and capable to make my own choices on how to raise my own family. The interpretation of what marijuana does and how it does it doesn’t even configure in my life (“There’s no hope with dope,” ODE, 10/15). I’m aware marijuana affects different people in different ways, but the issue here is still choice.
Human nature is always looking for escape — whether its coffee, tobacco, alcohol, food, money, sex, whatever. With the shape the nation’s in, it might help everyone to sit back and burn one just to think about what happened and how we’re going to deal with it.
I hate the thought of having to kill another human being, whether in war or peace, and not having a choice on how to deal with it myself. Marijuana is a minute issue. I have children and am dealing with issues of drugs, alcohol, violence, war and now terrorism. I have to teach them how to make their own choices on all of these subjects, and all I have to do it with is sheer determination, help from God, a strong (weakening) back and good friends and family.
Marijuana has strengthened my life in all of these areas. But now I’ve had to give up pot because of drug testing in the workplace. I’ve had the same job for 20 years. Pot has never interfered with anything until this testing started. I thought the Fourth Amendment meant what it said. Apparently I was wrong.
Dale Covington
Cross Plains, Tenn.
Don’t waste money
on 20-54
Please treat 20-54 propaganda as junk mail soliciting your hard-earned dollar. If it “promises more than it can deliver,” don’t waste your money.
The West Eugene Parkway is no more a “solution” than throwing gasoline on fire. Solutions to sprawl are not found by fueling more sprawl. They require step-by-step internal improvements. If surgeons bypassed congested organs to supply peripheral cancers, their patients would die.
That’s why the 1999 Oregon Highway Plan directs “ODOT and local jurisdictions to do everything possible to protect and improve the efficiency of the highway system before adding new highway facilities,” ranking new bypasses as the lowest priority.
That’s why the efforts of planners, elected officials, developers and citizens in TransPlan funded only WEP phase one, ranking the others 15th, 20th and last of the 28 currently nonfunded road projects in Lane County.
That’s why the Federal Highway Administration ruled you can’t start a bypass unless you have money to finish it.
The 1986 vote wasn’t to fund the WEP, only to approve a route that’s proved unworkable. Now developers are trying to bypass prioritization of your tax dollars by buying your vote for their short term financial gain, not for Lane County’s livability.
The WEP is not needed; it will destroy parklands that technology cannot fully mitigate and requires 4-5 times as much money as is currently funded. Guess whose pocket they’ll pick for that?
Vote no on 20-54. Use your limited tax dollars on higher priority transportation improvements.
Rich Coolman
Eugene
