LETTERS to the editor.

Extreme Public Policy

Paul Kahn, in "Extreme Measures" (July/ August 2001), sensitively examines the delicate question of how to deal with patients in a persistent vegetative state. However, I believe he disposes too casually of a key public policy issue regarding the impact on society of maintaining such patients indefinitely. Noting that society has paid "millions of dollars ... through Medicare and Medicaid" for the care of Annie's son, Benjamin, Kahn wonders rhetorically whether this large amount of money might be better directed toward solving health problems that we would all view as extremely worthwhile. However, he then lightly dismisses this consideration by asserting that "the brutal logic of such an equation would lead to the elimination of most elderly, sick, and disabled people."

This is sophistry, disposing in a single, casual sentence what is arguably the most critical issue in his entire article. Of course, anyone with an ounce of sympathy would wish Annie to be able to see her son alive and responsive, a functioning person once again. But Kahn argues that, because of Annie's passion and courage, Benjamin, who has displayed no sign of awareness for sixteen years, who is technically alive yet not able to function in any meaningful way--just barely existing in a vegetative state--should continue in this pitiful condition for an indefinite number of additional years at public expense. Such an argument sacrifices reason to emotion.

In describing the frightful personal dilemma here, Kahn notes that Benjamin's father, Tom, no longer can perceive this "figure on the hospital bed," kept alive only by a feeding tube, as his son. But, of course, at the personal level, Annie is as much entitled to consider Benjamin alive as her husband is to consider him virtually dead.

The issue here, however, is not strictly a personal one but, fundamentally, a societal one. I don't believe society should deploy endless resources to keep "alive" indefinitely one whose higher brain functions--those functions that endow us humans with our personhood and our humanity --have not cognitively worked for sixteen years and will never do so again. It is unreasonably glib for Kahn to dismiss this issue by suggesting that such a policy would lead us inevitably to the "elimination" (by inference, to the active killing) "of most elderly, sick, and disabled people." What tortured logic, to say that removing a persistently vegetative patient's feeding tube and allowing nature to take its course after sixteen years would open the door to the brutal elimination of those who our society has repeatedly committed itself to helping and sustaining. This is a "slippery slope" argument that rests on no discernable premise beyond arbitrary assertion.

For society to acknowledge that a human body without higher brain function has lost the key attributes of personhood in no way justifies the assumption that society would terminate the lives of elderly, sick, and disabled people. To paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, in the long run we are all elderly, sick, or disabled. Society well knows this, and we are hardly in danger from the bugbear of the slippery slope.

We must sympathize deeply with Annie, but society's needs should outweigh Annie's passionate and courageous but, ultimately, fruitless and costly vigil.

Peter Rogatz
Roslyn Heights, NY

Protesting the Protesters

I was disappointed that the articles in your July/August 2001 issue about the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) protests and riots in Quebec City failed to present a balanced judgment of the violence that unfortunately marred those events. However sympathetic one may be with the cause of the protesters, it must be acknowledged that it was the militant elements among them that inaugurated the violence, not the police. Once the protesters used bolt cutters to breech the barrier fence that separated them from the participants in the summit meetings, and hundreds poured into the breech as others lobbed rocks, bottles, and fence debris at the defending police, they had to be stopped. What other effective means could the police have used other than tear gas, water hoses, and rubber bullets? If there was excessive violence, surely both sides were guilty of it.

Your coverage castigates the violence used by the police, but I find only a fleeting expression of disapproval of the protester's violence. Sara Ahronheim admits in "On the Front Lines at the FTAA Protests" that it angered her that the troopers had to "defend themselves against concrete- and plywood-wielding black block aggressors ... who attacked the police." There is no indication, however, that the peaceful protesters did anything to try to stop such militant protesters.

Shouldn't the organizers who planned "peaceful and nonviolent protests" have anticipated that there would be rogue violence, and shouldn't they have had strategic plans to control it? Shouldn't they at least speak out retroactively with disapproval and apology? Failure to do so legitimizes and encourages such behavior, implying that it is permissible when used in a good cause. Am I too cynical when I charge the militant protesters with deliberately provoking police violence for the sake of the added publicity it generates in the media?

When protesters initiate violence it hardly behooves them to cry foul when they suffer violence in return. It is axiomatic that violence begets violence. Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and other pacifist leaders knew this and taught their followers a discipline that is today all too often untaught and unobserved.

Carl Verduin
Santa Rosa, CA

Showing the Way

I would like to commend you for providing Pat Duffy Hutcheon's article, "Beyond the Quest for Certainty," in the July/August 2001 Humanist. It seems to me that this is one of the most significant articles in a very long time.

She lays out clearly and well the challenge humanity faces due to current efforts "to make dualism intellectually legitimate in an age of science." This effort helps us to see the critical importance of humanism. Humanists are pioneers in a land all humankind must someday occupy. Our goal must be to gather the support necessary so this position is recognized widely as embodying courage as well as wisdom. Thereby, instead of leading to political suicide as it now could, it will be seen as a heroic position.

To the degree humanists build on the position Hutcheon lays out--that human beings are totally part of nature and derive morality from their evolutionary history--we have the potential to provide the guidance humanity so desperately requires at this critical time. Humanism needs to show the way for all to work together to maintain the species and develop it so that all individuals can achieve their full positive potential.

Arthur M. Jackson
San Jose, CA

Lovecraft's Humanist Ethic

Robert M. Price's article "H. P. Lovecraft: Prophet of Humanism" (July/ August 2001) was entertaining and perceptive. Like Lovecraft, when I was young I found traditional gods to be a little dull compared to the Greek and Roman gods.

We know a lot about Lovecraft's views because Arkham House published five volumes of his "Selected Letters." Also, there is a very good biography by L. Sprague DeCamp, H. P Lovecraft: A Biography. As Price notes, Lovecraft was a great influence on other artists. A major reason for this was Lovecraft's personal generosity toward others. He wrote thousands of letters to friends and admirers encouraging and advising them. In the days before e-mail this was his way of maintaining friendships.

Lovecraft's standard of ethical behavior was based on his conception of what a "gentleman" should be. Lord Dunsany might have fit that role model, even though he was Irish, not English. The fact that Lovecraft was a relatively unknown writer struggling on the edge of poverty was irrelevant to this view of how he should conduct his life and in what he should believe. Personal honor was a standard and guiding principle that, for him, needed no religious injunctions.

Dave Silva,
Seal Beach, CA

Youth Violence

Gregory Shafer's essay "Cinema and the American Malaise" ("Creative Controversy," July/August 2001) illuminated some cogent points about the current (and longstanding) "malaise" in our increasingly violent society. There is little doubt of the culpability of cinema in elevating the virtue of guns, as well as other weapons, in the hands of perceive heroes.

Invoking the marred statistics of "historian" Michael Bellesiles, however, was a mistake; Bellesiles' book has been trashed and reviled as erroneous (at least) by other historians since its publication. Could any thinking person believe that over 4,000 children die each year from gunfire? This is the fantasy perpetuated years ago by Handgun Control, Inc., and accepted by the ignorant among us. The majority of "children" involved in fatal shootings were seventeen- to nineteen-year-olds (going on thirty) involved in drug-related or other illegal pursuits.

Violence by our young shouldn't be all laid at the feet of Hollywood, however warranted; civilian society has unfortunately taken a page out of military indoctrination which enables one to kill enemies efficiently without psychological ramifications. Video war games utilized by the military are mimicked by games played by our young, virtually desensitizing them to violence. This is deplorable but has become a fact of life.

It is necessary for us to rectify this societal anomaly before we founder irreversibly.

William R. Appel
Doyle, CA

Addendum

In our March/April 2001 cover story, "Big Brother Is Watching," we neglected to note that, among the sources used, were "Cameras, Cameras Everywhere," a February 1, 2001, article by Lance Gay issued by Scripps Howard News Service, and "Watch Your Step: Robbing Banks Just Got Harder," published December 19, 1999, in the Austin American-Statesman and issued by Cox News Service.