LETTERS: THE EVER-FADING LINE

To the editor:

The young couple from Delaware drives nervously to a motel, delivers their baby, kills the baby and puts the baby into a trash container. In Arkansas, two boys have a fight on the school bus while going home for the day. The next morning one of the boys (14 years old) brings a gun to school and shoots the other boy to death. No longer shocked by such frequent actions in our society, we still shake our heads and wonder what has happened to our young people. Where do they get such madness? Don't they have any respect for human life?

Before we have the psychiatrist dig deep into their seemingly twisted minds to find out what went wrong, perhaps we really need to look no further than the 1960s generation to find the answer to the problem. Or perhaps they don't have a problem. Maybe there are just taking the value of human life that we have conveyed to them one step further. After all, wouldn't two generations prior to ours wonder in sickening amazement at what little respect our generation has for human life?

The faded argument of the late 1960s and early 1970s went like this: "It's only a blob of tissue, a product of conception. It's really not a baby. If we allow abortion, only wanted children will be brought into this world. Therefore, all children will be loved, and child abuse will end." The technology of ultrasound removed the argument that it wasn't a baby. The new argument: "All right, it's a baby, but it's my choice as to whether it lives or dies. You see, it's a matter of my convenience, timeliness, economic abilities and any other reason I choose. Life of the unborn is a matter of relativity."

Isn't that what the couple in Delaware said, and the boy in Arkansas? Isn't that what thousands of other Americans are saying each year? Aren't they saying we just moved the relative line of life a little farther than you did? After all, if the line is movable, why should your generation have the sole authority on exactly where the line on the value of human life really belongs?

Could it be that the free-love generation of the 1960s made a big mistake and didn't think things through thoroughly? Ah, but justice always prevails in the end. A friend of mine who is a nurse related to me the following conversation she had with an elderly lady who was hospitalized. "We're next, you know." My friend asked what she meant. "Pretty soon they'll realize it costs too much to take care of us," said the elderly lady, "and they will just give us a shot and put us away." My compassionate friend assured the patient that would not happen, but in her heart she knew the lady was right. But I say, "Take heart, madam. Not in your generation." That is reserved for the 1960s generation. Poetic justice, you know.

RAY ROWLAND

Dexter