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EXPOSING PRISONS
I wanted to take a few moments early in this legislative session to congratulate the Santa Fe Reporter and Dan Frosch for your series of articles covering health care in our state's corrections system ["
"]. As exposed in the articles, health care in our prisons is deplorable.
Dan Frosch did an amazing and professional job of following the issue of health care in our prisons through his investigation, research and writing. His pursuit of journalistic excellence produced a change in government. If not for these reports, the Wexford contract would have continued and prisoners would continue to face life-and-death situations. The articles exposed defects in our corrections system. I am reminded of Fyodor Dostoevsky's comment: "The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by observing its prisoners." The Reporter forced the State of New Mexico to face the conditions in which its prisoners live.
Dan Frosch and the Santa Fe Reporter have not only given voice to the highest ideals of a free press, but have also engaged our citizens in bringing about positive change in how our government functions.
State Sen. Cisco McSorley, D-Bernalillo
Albuquerque
CRAFTING CHILDREN
Congratulations on a well-written article, "
" [Cover story, Jan. 31], by Laura Paskus! She described a number of excellent remedies fellow New Mexican educators are offering young people. It will take thousands of similar efforts from every facet of society to shift the cultural paradigm and reinvigorate ourselves within the natural world.
In
The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture
, Frank R Wilson writes about how human development and growth are formed by meaning-filled activities with the hands. Along with losing the connection to nature, we are abandoning the education of our hands through pottery, cooking, woodworking, metalworking, gardening, etc. Research is revealing that craft activities inform crucial development of our brain in ways that keyboard use and video game controls cannot.
In addition to building a solid academic foundation, the Waldorf school curriculum from preschool to 12th grade is infused with both outdoor and wilderness education and the practical arts for this reason: For children to grow to young adulthood, all nine of Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences must be addressed, in every class, in an integrated fashion.
Barbara Booth
Administrator
Santa Fe Waldorf School
SUPPORTING POLESE
Newly elected to the school board, Richard Polese has a good deal of support in District 2, including my own [Letters, Feb. 14: "
"]. People with influence on the schools, inside and outside the Board of Education, are wise to anticipate determined and thoughtful opposition, by Mr. Polese and many others in District 2, to the suggestion that we're going to give up excellent schools just because someone decided that it makes statistical sense to themselves.
Robert Covelli
Santa Fe
DOCENT RANT
I stand here pockmarked with tantrum (I would wish for pallid!) in my zodiac-walled efficiency, with pins in my lips, threads in my teeth, cunningly surrounded by cut squares of capitulating cotton for a quilt project of international value [Zane's World, Jan. 31: "
"]. And I recall I was perusing the countertops and the food crevices, looking for my docent training note-I had at least three or four cryptic words that were somehow relevant-words with which I plan to snatch up the unsuspecting Detroiter, the occasional blowsy-haired dog, the penitentiary visitor or just whomever is half available. Usually if one marches up to she and Betty, eg., who are obviously wondering which the hell way to go, and one acts peremptorily and fetchingly overwhelming, most people can't think how to stop you and get away. Still, you know, Zany, your suggestion to step quickly out from behind a lackluster O'Keeffe and just yell, "Blah, blah, blah tourista"-that's a better way to go really. I think you should paint your fingernails so I can locate you.
Julia Hunkins
Santa Fe
FREE SWEET LUNCH?
Dinsdale's brilliant lobbyist article just scratches the surface on legislative manipulation [Cover story, Feb. 14: "
"]. I don't call it "corruption"; while these folks are frequently underinformed on substantive issues, their constituents completely lack the truth. Newspapers and even television blocks the truth that might disturb some advertiser.
This was the case on the aspartame/formaldehyde issue: Corporations afraid of medical truth proving liability spend millions to hire lobbyists to kill bills.
The Reporter should do two more articles on lobbyists' stranglehold on the NM Legislature. It's not a pretty picture; if someone offered you a free lunch, contributed to your campaign and brought you chocolate on Valentine's Day to forget about Galileo and NASA, and vote that the world is flat and goes around the sun and that Santa Fe is the capital of Alaska, would you vote for that because it wouldn't matter in the real world, eh? That's how lobbyists work.
Hope for a memorial on aspartame/formaldehyde to at least develop warning labels and get it out of the schools. This falls way short of the ban New Mexico needs, thanks to corporate lobbyists and corporate-serving legislators.
Stephen Fox
Santa Fe
GETTING WARMER
It's ironic, in the same week you published Mr. Brown's letter "
" [Jan. 31] on global warming, The New York Times publishes a story headlined "Science Panel Calls Global Warming 'Unequivocal.'"
In summary, "the" not "a" leading international network of climate scientists has concluded for the first time that global warming is "unequivocal" and that human activity is the main driver, "very likely" causing most of the rise in temperatures since 1950. Even the Bush administration has accepted the panel's findings, which are supported by governments around the world (including ours) who have final say over the report's contents.
Mr. Brown uses economics as an argument against doing anything. I have a simple question for Mr. Brown and other skeptics: What if you're wrong?
People thought Copernicus was wrong about the earth being round, and Galileo was imprisoned for suggesting the earth revolved around the sun. Let's hope such people represent an ever-decreasing minority and that the majority wakes up to the great opportunities that lay ahead in confronting and solving this challenge!
Walter Cohen
Santa Fe
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