LETTERS IN THE EDITOR'S MAILBAG.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Don't give up right of way

There is one more lesson that should be gleaned from the recent accident near Churchill High School that might prevent future tragedies. The good Samaritan who stopped in traffic to let the boy cross was trying to help. That person was being considerate and compassionate. But the fact is, that person in that car gave up his or her right of way.

You should never give up your right of way. The concept of right of way was founded on the idea of keeping traffic moving and keeping everyone safe in the process. That boy had a bike and time on his hands. He could afford to wait for a break in traffic, or he could have gone down the street to a crosswalk. By stopping in mid-street, that driver put pressure on the boy to act in order to not hold up traffic. Yet that driver could not control the other lanes of traffic to ensure the child's safety.

So, yes, that teenager should have been driving more conservatively. And yes, that young boy on the bike should have been more observant or should have waved the first car off and refused to cross. But the good Samaritan should not have stopped in the first place.

Accidents happen when unforeseen events line up just right. Or wrong. And by giving up the right of way in traffic, that good Samaritan may have started a chain of events that caused one boy to die and gave another boy a hellish, lifelong memory.

If you want to help someone, do it the right way.

Jeff Greif

Elmira

Who will write Petraeus report?

Is anyone besides me wondering who beyond Gen. David Petraeus will be writing "The Petraeus Report"?

Henry Dizney

Eugene

Upgrade world, don't destroy it

I liked Justin Morell's devilish Sept. 2 letter which concludes that "there also should be some space left to debate the flatness of the Earth and whether or not the common cold is caused by evil spirits."

As a compromise position we could say that, yes, the Earth is flat according to Thomas Friedman's CEO-loving economic hypothesis and yes, the common cold is caused by a God-created virus. But this only shows that compromise is sometimes only a weird wicked witch of the West without real merit. The solution: wonderful witches!

The six letters immediately following Morell's did an excellent job of debunking "intelligent design" creationism.

The wonderful thing about science is that it is continuously upgrading itself, a trick most religions are incapable of learning due to excessive glorifying of ancient texts.

Learning the mistakes of the past will help us learn how to survive our degrading world. We need to upgrade our world, not destroy it with stupid and immoral pollution and stupid and immoral wars.

Bob D. Saxton

Eugene

Tasers: Cattle prods for the poor

Is Eugene sliding into a police state?

The process always seems to use an event of terror, like 9/11, to stun the populace (and human rights programs) into allowing the destruction of human and civil rights. Then, after anti-human rights laws are passed, domination by the police state and the loss of human rights for the marginalized follows.

Here in Eugene, first came the tragic Ryan Salisbury shooting in the south hills. Immediately Tasers were snuck in, those horrible weapons that leave people writhing in the dust, begging for mercy.

Though the police are clear that Tasers are unsafe to be used against armed people, they were marketed in Eugene as a way to stop "suicide by cop." In reality, they are cattle prods for the restive poor.

And I now worry about "Crisis Intervention Training," offered to the police as a way to gain control of dysfunctional, often delusional people without having to shoot them. Sounds good, but CIT has a dangerous possible side effect.

CIT training is sometimes led by those who see the dysfunctional as genetically defective, mentally ill, and so in need of forced drugging and incarceration. Writing as one who was nearly destroyed by a bizarre mental health system straight out of "Cuckoo's Nest," I worry for the future.Some cities simply haul away their lost and lonely, label them crazy, and if they resist, use Tasers as a terror weapon.

CIT without human rights integration leads to "Big Nurse."

Hugh Massengill

Eugene

Try cooling your diet

I was very impressed with Leonardo DiCaprio's powerful documentary, "The 11th Hour." The film depicts the devastating impacts of global warming, including droughts, hurricanes and flooding of coastal areas. It features interviews with the brightest minds on our planet about the causes of this manmade environmental crisis and possible solutions.

A powerful solution was suggested last November in a report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. The report found that meat production accounts for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. That's more than automobiles!

Carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas, is emitted by burning forests to create animal pastures and combustion of fossil fuels to operate farm machinery, trucks, refrigeration equipment, factory farms and slaughterhouses. Much more damaging methane and nitrous oxide are released from digestive tracts of cattle and from animal waste cesspools, respectively.

The good news is that each of us can do our part to reduce global warming on our next trip to the supermarket. More details are available at www.CoolYourDiet.org.

Elijah Hennison

Eugene

It's disturbing, not appalling

A reader flared up at The Register-Guard's use of the word "flare" to characterize a roadside painting with pizazz (letters, Sept. 4). Such solecisms cause me to be disturbed, annoyed, chagrined. But appalled? Heavens to Betsy! To the back burner with world hunger and Iraq.

The English language is succumbing to rampant corruption! The cited homonymic slip is clarified by exhaustive dictionary definitions of both words with their several synonyms. Wouldn't a simple, humorously sardonic sentence drive home the same point without a sledgehammer? "I don't see the flare, it must have burned out. On the other hand, the painting does have a distinctive flair."

My own peeve is the neutering of forceful adjectives by overkill. A clean shirt is nice, but awesome? The frequent use of "lay" for "lie" is irksome, but appalling?

Jim Wood

Eugene

An update from `Shortdawg'

This letter is to any of my radio listeners out there who might be wondering where I went.

For roughly five years on 91.9 KRVM-FM public radio I was known by the on-air handle of Shortdawg. My primary gig was The Beatles Hour on Saturday mornings.

Well, in late August I was fired as a volunteer disc jockey (can volunteers be fired?) without so much as a warning for supposedly violating station policy by taking Beatles requests - despite the fact that I had been doing so once a month for several years with no objections and was always inundated by calls from enthusiastic listeners who, as time went on and more and more programming became automated, were ever increasingly happy to hear a live presence in the broadcast booth.

Moreover, several of those callers were going through deep emotional trauma (one was dying of cancer, for example; another had a son die), and they often told me that being able to talk to a sympathetic voice once a month and then request a favorite Beatles song brought them some small measure of solace in their otherwise pain-filled lives.

So, to all those listeners who did call in with their requests and kind words during my years at KRVM, I just wanted to say, "thanks."

Hopefully at some point in the future I'll be able to broadcast again, so stay tuned. Until then, I'm "Shortdawg out."

Corey Albert

Eugene

Lanker's legacy was overlooked

Oregon Public Broadcasting's recent documentary featuring the outstanding work of Register-Guard photographers gave readers a chance to appreciate the pictorial treasure that arrives on the porch each morning. If you travel and see other newspapers around the country you'll seldom find anything equal to what we have in Eugene.

But one important name was missing from the documentary, that of Brian Lanker, and it was Lanker who started it all.

Lanker, a Pulitzer-winning photographer from The Topeka Capital Journal, was hired by The Register-Guard at the age of 27 in the mid-1970s to overhaul the rather staid photography of the paper and introduce Eugene to true photojournalism.

During his years at the paper he built a talented staff and wrested control of graphic presentation from the copy editors who had traditionally selected and cropped the pictures and done the layouts. Photographs, once little more than decorations on the page, became major elements of the stories, and the paper took on a sparkle it had never shown before.

Lanker still lives in Eugene, but he left the paper years ago to do work for magazines like Life, Sports Illustrated and National Geographic, to publish books like the internationally acclaimed "I Dream a World," the story of black women in America; to direct a documentary about the combat artists of World War II for the Public Broadcasting System and to work for commercial accounts of some of the biggest corporations in the world. Nike comes to mind.

The Register-Guard's magnificent photography, entrusted to other capable hands today, exists as part of Brian Lanker's legacy.

Dave Emery

Eugene