RUST COMMENTARY: CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM FROM A DAUGHTER

I helped raise some of my best critics. Here's a letter from my daughter, Penny, that merits a broader audience.

Dear Dad,

I was shocked to see something printed in the May 1 Southeast Missourian newspaper that I wanted to bring to your attention. The article was located in the Religion section, and the story was entitled "Modern paganism." It was a full-page article that continued on another page filled with three colored pictures and a featured satanic symbol in the headline. I was offended by the printed spells in the upper left corner and was baffled by the following thoughts that immediately flooded my mind ...

1. Who on the newspaper staff initiated this idea for a story, and who gave permission for this article to be printed?

2. Is the reporter a member of the Blessed Moon club at Southeast Missouri State University which has 15 members. Is there a faculty member on staff at the university that promotes this philosophy? (When I was going there students pointed out to me those who identified being witches way back then.)

3. Since we are learning to work together in this family business venture, how are we going to handle some things that contradict our business goals? I know one of our goals is to objectively report information and allow the readers to decide for themselves, but when do some things cross the lines (or our boundaries)? I am mature enough to understand that we try to report on things in our area, even if I personally may differ philosophically. However, this article bothers me, and I'm trying to figure out why. Maybe its because I see what Alex (her son) said in a speech he wrote about character that "people's characters are facing a battle against inappropriate movies, terrible video games, and other bad influences." William Bennett would say that we are fighting moral and spiritual ideas and that ideas do have consequences.

4. I thought the timing of this article was in poor taste particularly after the Columbine incident where both boys dabbled in satanism and the occult. Any law enforcing officer in Fayetteville and in the military would agree that tenets of these types of "beliefs" are not healthy for our youth. Ideas do have consequences! Doing a story on it wouldn't be bad in itself. I differ with the amount of exposure it received and where they placed the article in the Religion section.

5. Why wasn't the National Day of Prayer information more prominently displayed with cool graphics and pictures and quotes from Shirley Dobson and others to attract the reader to the story like the huge featured article on modern paganism was? National Day of Prayer would not only have more readership, but is a start in helping America heal in the grieving process over all our national junk.

6. Although the article was an informative article -- there was little criticism from others how they feel about witches and covens and Wicca, etc. Where was our Christian voice to give an objective perspective to this story?

Thanks for reading this wordy letter. After you've read the story and processed your feelings, I would like to know your perspective and insight on the story and the general issue of goals, boundaries, etc. I appreciate all the wonderful things your papers do in our community to impact for good. I welcome dialogue from you. You are the expert in this field. I love you very much and thank you for reading.

Love, Penny

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Will Clinton trade U.S. honor for a false peace? Peace is at hand, and inspecting bomb-damage assessments must now give way to scrutinizing President Clinton's pronouncements, Boris Yeltsin's outbursts, the Group of Eight's communiques and China's response to the accidental bombing of its embassy. Anyone interested in justice for Kosovo and in protecting American interests and values would be well advised to examine with the diligence of a Talmudic scholar Mr. Clinton's recent statements about a just settlement of the conflict in Kosovo. I confess I find it hard to suppress the fear that betrayal lies hidden in the ambiguities of the president's language.

Mr. Clinton and our NATO allies have waged a war on the cheap, with tragic but predictable consequences. The president's repeated, public and gratuitous disavowals of the ground-troops option are mystifying to most diplomatic and military strategists. But when considered in a '90s political context, it appears the president's reluctance to lead is the most discouraging Dick Morris moment yet amid all the bleak events triangulation has yielded. The president does not want the power vested in his office to defend America's interests and values in the world, because the hazard inherent in its exercise exceed his personal threshold for political risk, a threshold I sometimes feel is only wide enough to admit policies on the order of Social Security demagoguery.

As essential as a war without casualties might be to the president's and the vice president's political fortunes, it has been a disaster of epic proportions to the people of Kosovo, who put their trust in NATO's commitment, so that Mr. Milosevic felt safe enough to disperse his forces widely. Instead of massing his army to meet a possible ground attack, he deployed it in small units, enabling his soldiers to reach more towns in considerably less time than if Mr. Clinton had remained silent on the question of ground troops. Mr. Milosevic has been able to displace, rape and murder more Kosovars more rapidly than he could have had he feared he might face the mightiest army on earth.

Despite NATO's now more aggressive air campaign, these small ethnic-cleansing units are still slaughtering Kosovars. Their tanks are hard to destroy from an altitude of 15,000 feet, where NATO bombers are ordered to remain because their loss would be a greater calamity to the allied nations than the tens of thousands of Kosovars and Serbs who have died in this half-war. The promised Apache helicopters never arrived on the battlefield. Their deployment was easily detected as a ruse by Mr. Milosevic because their use is always limited to support of a ground campaign, and their delivery kept a pace more appropriate to the Steam Age.

By now, Americans may have wearied so much of Mr. Clinton's leadership failures that they no longer bother to notice them. But when the president takes us to war, committing American lives and prestige to a conflict that he lacks the will to win, we must all stir ourselves from apathy and do what we can to rescue the nation's security and honor from the calamity he has exposed us to. We must not let the happy chatter about NATO's air campaign forcing Mr. Milosevic to "cry uncle" lull us into thinking that NATO has truly achieved the objectives we went to war for in the first place: the removal of all of Mr. Milosevic's forces from Kosovo, autonomy and security for Kosovo protected by a well-armed NATO peacekeeping force, and the safe return of the Kosovars to their homes. -- U.S. Sen. John McCain

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Where's the treaty? We're up to Day 724 and counting. That's the number of days since May 14, 1997, the date President Clinton promised to send the Senate the amendments to the ABM Treaty that he negotiated with the Russians. Two years later, the Senate is still waiting. And waiting. The president has yet to do his constitutional duty and submit the amendments for its advice and consent. -- The Wall Street Journal

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Jackson negotiates with racism in Serbia, promotes it at home: Jesse Jackson's campaign for racial "right to capital" favors race over ability: As Jesse Jackson makes news by jumping into that seething cauldron of ethnic hatreds -- the Balkans -- too little attention is being paid to his own campaign for creating racial conflict at home. He has been urging America to enter what he calls the "next frontier of the civil rights movement." He wants us to recognize a "right to capital."

Jackson has targeted Wall Street and Silicon Valley, claiming that investors aren't lending "enough" money to black-owned businesses, that companies are not putting "enough" blacks on their boards of directors, and that technology firms aren't hiring "enough" black engineers and computer programmers.

"Enough" -- by what standard? Both Wall Street and Silicon Valley demand the highest levels of ability. To write millions of lines of software code, or to design the next generation of computer chips, or to direct a billion-dollar corporation -- these are jobs requiring an unusual amount of education, experience, judgment and intelligence. Yet these are not the criteria by which Jackson believes such individuals should be hired. He demands, instead, that they be selected by a method about as sophisticated as drawing names at random from a phone book.

Take his Silicon Valley crusade. Jackson points to the fact that blacks make up only 4 percent of the employees in the region's high-technology firms, while they constitute 8 percent of the area's population. But software companies do not pull their employees off the street at whim. They hire from a pool of educated, technically knowledgeable people. Yet according to the Department of Education, blacks make up only 5.3 percent of those who receive college degrees in engineering and computer science.

Given these statistics, it would be more rational to attribute low numbers of black computer programmers to the abysmal failure of our public schools, which have failed to prepare inner-city children for college. There may even be more innocuous explanations: Cypress Semiconductor CEO T.J. Rogers points to statistics showing that far more blacks pursue advanced degrees in medicine and education than in engineering, and asks: "If top African-American students choose to be doctors or educators instead of engineers, why blame Silicon Valley?"

But Jackson regards such considerations as irrelevant. He does not bother to ask how many blacks have the qualifications or interest to acquire these jobs. Instead, he insists that they be granted jobs in proportion to their numbers in the general population -- and condemns anything less as a violation of "civil rights."

His approach to Wall Street is similar. Is he seriously suggesting that investment bankers are not greedy enough to want to make lots of money from the talents of black economic geniuses? And if there indeed are, as Jackson implies, black Warren Buffets and Bill Gateses who are being denied capital for no reason other than their skin color -- why doesn't he organize an investment fund to profit from this enormous financial opportunity?

The answer is that Jackson does not care about business acumen or any other objective form of merit. It is precisely such qualities that he wants to override in favor of the meaningless fact of race. Jackson's demands constitute, not a fight for civil rights, but an assault on human ability.

Notice that Jackson offers no proof of racial discrimination in these fields. There are no stories of talented black programmers or financiers being turned away from potential employers. All that Jackson cites is these companies' failure to meet an arbitrarily devised racial quota. This is a particularly insidious form of the injustice inherent in "affirmative action" -- under which hiring and promotion are based, not on an individual's competence, but on racial quotas. It is bad enough to put race above merit when it comes to employing people to pull levers on assembly lines. But can one imagine hiring on the basis of quotas when the job is to direct a billion-dollar conglomerate?

In the computer industry, Bill Gates looks for "supersmart" programmers, and has even purchased small software companies just to acquire their talented employees. On Wall Street, the genius of one CEO can make the difference between bankruptcy and billions. These are arenas in which human ability is paramount -- precisely the reason that profit-seeking computer executives or Wall Street investors cannot afford to indulge in racial prejudice, including the kind of "reverse racism" endorsed by Jackson. They cannot afford to make business decisions based on any standard other than individual ability. If Jackson learns anything from his Serbia trip, it should be the utter irrationality of judging people by ethnic heritage. -- Robert W. Tracinski, Rand Institute

~Gary Rust is president of Rust Communications, which owns the Southeast Missourian and other newspapers.