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A D V E R T I S E M E N T
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A D V E R T I S E M E N T
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Un-plugging the Gap
To the editor: Thanks to HearSay for enlightening me about Gap sweatshops and other gaps in the company’s corporate responsibility. I haven’t shopped there in years. Now I won’t at all. Maybe if they would change their ways it might help slow their eroding profits. If anyone can, they could make it “cool” to be a responsible company. For now though, Patagonia is the poster child of a well-run and responsible company. They pioneered the use of organic cotton in all of their products, for example, and make them to last. Check it out.
Don Young
Fort Worth
Making it with MJ
To the editor: Here’s a pat on the back for your article (“Reefer Sadness,” Dec. 12, 2002). Journalists are going to be the catalyst for federal legalization of medical marijuana. After you comes CNN, and after CNN, the world! I, like George MacMahon and many others, use marijuana as medicine, though for myself and those many others it is quite illegal. I’d rather live in the fear of being taken to jail and having a big black mark on my record than to live with the pain of rheumatoid arthritis. I’m only 18. I have a long life ahead of me, and a lot of things I would like to accomplish before it’s over. I can’t even make a living without smoking marijuana. The pain is too disabling. And the medications have side effects that live on the same level as that pain. So there’s your pat on the back. The efforts of thumb-on-the-pulse journalists, along with activists, are a comfort to all of us with a lifetime of chronic pain at our feet. I thank you kindly. One of my friends is a medical marijuana activist and this is one of his contributions: http://productionclips.com/losangeles.htm. It’s a very helpful web site.
Mary Brownlee
Denton
Static on the Line
To the editor: On Aug. 27, 2001, we moved to Trophy Club from New York City. I read your article insinuating that President Bush is the real hijacker and it’s an insult to all New Yorkers and Americans (legal Americans). Perhaps you would understand, if you had a sister who worked in Tower One and lost four employees or had a brother who worked across the street and made it out by 90 seconds and wound up breaking his arm or perhaps if you had worked with a friend for 15 years who lost his son and son-in-law or another fellow employee who lost both his sons (New York City policemen) or perhaps you had a neighbor who was killed, leaving behind three children all under the age of seven.
But no, you are either too young or too naïve to understand. People like you who allow illegal aliens to live here and off of us have brought us to this point. You seem to think that illegal aliens have the same rights as citizens. You should be suggesting that we eliminate the gasoline engine (we put a man on the moon in 1969) — that would bankrupt the Arab world. But I would imagine you’re not for that because it would also economically hurt Texas.
This is a holy war and the Arab terrorists absolutely believed in their god and kill and continue to kill in the name of their god. Our government and journalists like yourself are doing the citizens of this country a terrible disservice by looking for “other reasons” for 9/11.
Unfortunately journalists have been soft-pedaling the devastation, refusing to show or talk about people having to jump to their deaths, the 6,000 injuries, people getting injured or killed by flying body parts, body parts flying through office and apartment windows, people being trapped and electrocuted in the elevators.
Shame on your profession for trying to find other reasons or blame our government and its citizens for 9/11. It is simply that the Arab world hates us and our way of life and is out to destroy us. Never forget that, never forget.
Greg Lamont
Trophy Club
Editor’s response: The Dec. 19, 2002, Static item to which Mr. Lamont objects said that the Bill of Rights “seems to have been hijacked right after 9/11/01” by a “thief-in-a-Bush-suit” when everyone, including the news media, was not looking. There was no blaming of the government or U.S. citizens for what happened on Sept. 11. There was no mention of illegal aliens, gasoline engines, or the reasons for the 9/11 tragedy. Beyond that, Fort Worth Weekly has reported, in two cover stories, on radical Islamist terrorism cases with ties leading back to Texas. While no one in our office was as closely affected by the 9/11 tragedy as Mr. Lamont’s family and friends, Weekly writers and executives of the company that owned this paper at the time of the 9/11 tragedy did lose friends in the destruction. And finally — to reiterate the point of the Static item — if the U.S. government jettisons the civil protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, then the most important facet of the American way of life will indeed have been destroyed — but not by terrorists.
Correction
In a story about historic preservation laws (“Christmas Ceasefire,” Dec. 19, 2002), the name of Shanon Wasielewski, a historical preservation planner for Fort Worth, was misspelled. Fort Worth Weekly regrets the error.
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