LETTERS: WE ARE OUR OWN WORST ENEMY

To the editor:

My husband spent 20 years in the Air Force, at least eight years in Vietnam and Thailand. As you know, we lost over 55,000 young men in that war, some of whom were my friends. Because of the politicians' unwillingness to follow through and win the war or to pull out, this is the only war that the United States lost.

The war was lost in the streets of the United States when it was lost in the hearts of its citizens. On the news I saw the same protest from Ohio college students as they drowned out Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and the other politicians who had come to televise a message to the American people and to Saddam Hussein.

Saddam already knows that we are unwilling in our hearts to support such a war and that he is halfway there in winning this time. I wonder how our leaders expect us to fight a war over there when we are fighting for our survival over here. Our homes and businesses and farms are being washing away, buried or blown away every day. Seems to me like we have a war of survival over here.

Do you think that God is trying to tell us something? Since we have managed to shove God out of our lives and have made ourselves gods, he doesn't have to cause anything to happen. We are destroying ourselves.

I believe that is we enter a war that we will be entering it all by ourselves. In other words, God will not be with us, because we are no longer a righteous people. We have taken over our lives for ourselves.

Why, we don't need God to create babies, to cure disease or even to help us die with dignity. If we want to have a baby, then we can create an embryo and store it away for a rainy day when we decide that we are ready to become parents. And now we have amniocentesis and ultrasound to alert us if the baby that we carry is less than perfect. Only perfect babies need be born. And now we don't have to wait for God to call us home. We can decide when the final curtain will fall. We can die with dignity with a mask over our face inhaling carbon monoxide.

Who doesn't want to have a cloned baby? Maybe that will be the next fad. Every home must have one. Already our brave scientists are planning on cloning less intelligent people who can be used to harvest organs so that we can all go on living endlessly. And everyone in our country is so happy -- so happy that I can't stand it.

CHRISTINE E. STEPHENS

Cape Girardeau