Letters
With a balanced diet,
anyone can be healthy
Brcni Boettcher’s letter (Letters,
Nov. 23) is obviously a biased opinion
based on his studies. He has not looked
at other viable viewpoints and op
tions.
I have been a vegetarian all of my
life. I am just as healthy within my
group as anyone else is. Through a
proper balancing of your diet, anyone
can be healthy. Beans and eggs con
tain the “missing nutrients.” Milk
helps provide these, too. Another al
ternative is meat substitutes or mock
meats. With these things, you do not
run the risk of cholesterol buildup,
parasitical disease or cancerous sub
stances from the flesh of animals and
birds. Some people may say that the
slaughterhouses are under strict gov
ernment control to prevent this, but do
they check each and every piece of
meat? Also, cholesterol can cause
heart attacks. People who don’t cat
meat run a much lower risk (between
60 and 80 percent) of having heart
attacks. It’s something to think about.
Boettcher makes the point that
“animals respond by instinct to stim
uli in their environment.” If one is to
use his argument, then, humans are
animals and we can eat them and not
feel sorry for them. It’s the logical
conclusion, considering that humans
respond to stimuli just as much as
animals do. Heat, cold, touches,
changes in the light, sound — they all
affect us. We respond to stimuli. But
we have one more step over animals
— we can think. I don’t agree. Web
ster tells us thought can be a clearly
defined intention. For an example,
I’ve had cows come up to me and
make me pet them. Some people may
say, “The cows associate you with
affection, and that stimulates them to
gooverand 'ask for affection.’” There
are two problems with that. Toassoci
ate something with something else,
you must remember it, and to do
something on our own, you must in
tend to do it. The logical conclusion is
that cows must think, because two
thought processes occur. If Boettcher
has never seen this take place, he must
have never worked with the animals I
have. My conclusion is that animals
are intelligent, just not as much as we
arp
Boettcher also seems to think the
farm crisis has been caused by the
underproduction of plant products.
Untrue. Much of the problem has been
caused by overproduction. Because of
the surpluses, the farmers can’t sell
their products for anything more than
rock bottom. This causes the farmers
to take a loss on their production cost
vs. sale price, and then they need to
lake out loans for the next year plus the
price of their machinery. Add this to
the uncertainly of the weather, and
you sec why so many farmers go out of
business. The point is the world could
live on a vegetable diet with today’s
advanced skills and technology in
farming.
There are other arguments such as
the cost of farm mg vs. ranching and so
on, but the fact is that in this day and
age you don’t have to have meat to
survive.
Lynn Baxter
freshman
broadcasting
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Novel tells of church-state conflict
Born-again Watergate convict questions society's dismissal of religious values
Wc aie asKcu, wnai dook would
you recommend for Christ
mas? I answer, not with
struggle or equivocation, but with the
sensation that 1 am all three kings at
once, bequeathing gold, frankincense
and myrrh: “Kingdoms in Conflict.”
Publisher: William Morrow. Author:
Charles Colson.
William F.
Buckley Jr.
Remember?
Perhaps. Charles Colson was the
White House intimate of Richard
Nixon who indisputably presided over
much of what was ugly in Operation
Watergate and all that Watergate
symbolized. He was tried, convicted
and went to prison. And, yes, he was
reborn, a word that for reasons that
testify to the perversity of modern
thought patterns tends to estrange,
rather than gladden, cosmopolitan
American gentry.
Many Americans would be more
attracted to read about a con who dis
covered in prison the Marquis dc Sadc
than one who discovered Christ. Char- ;
les Colson did the latter, went on to
lound an organization (Prison Fellow -
ship) designed to reform prison prac
tices (Does it make sense to send to
prison a white collar criminal instead,
say, of putting him to work as a janitor,
under strict probation?); and he has
become an eloquentcritic of the creep
ing notion that the American dream is
one that can be fulfilled without any
sense of a bond to higher laws than
those that emerge from yesterday’s
parliamentary exercise.
This is hardly a fresh idea. John
Adams wrote: “Our Constitution was
made only for a moral and religious
people. It is wholly inadequate for the
government of any other.” At the other
:nd, we hear Lord Melbourne say
Juring a great debate in Great Britain,
Things have come to a pretty pass
when religion is allowed to invade
public life.” Lord Melbourne was
irguing against the case being made,
?y William Wilberforce, that slavery
should for moral reasons be declared
llegal.
The arguments — church-state, the
:orrect admixture between the two —
are familiar grist for controversial
mills, but Colson does wonderful thc
Urical instruction in his book.
It begins with a fictional account of
in American president, elected in the
1990s, who is a fundamentalist and
believes that God had instructed him
not to interfere under any circum
stances with any Nraeli strategic
maneuver. What happens then? I
swear, James Clavell could not have
written that chapter more dramati
cally.
The point of which? That the rele
vant difference is institutional: No
government should be tied institution
ally to the institutional arm of any
religion. But the institutional incest
has nothing to do with quite other
relationships. Because a mother
should not sleep with her son, it docs
not follow that she should have no role
in his upbringing.
Colson’s superb sense of historical
theater tells us poignantly, desolately,
just what happened to the institutional
Lutheran Church when threatened by
Hitler. It gave in, excepting the minor
ity, which held out — pleading higher
laws than Hitler’s. (Wonderful quote
from survivor Martin Nicmoller: “In
Germany they came first... for the
Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I
wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the
trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up
because I was a Protestant. Then they
came for me, and by that time no one
was left to speak up.”)
He gives us then an only slightly
fictionalized accountofthegravcdays
in Great Britain when Neville Cham
berlain, refusing to believe that Hitler
was evil, talked his way into compla
cency, one step of many that led to 50
million deaths.
The Brits went on to face the war,
which they won, thanks to us. But look
what happened in the weeks after the
war was won. We faced the question
whether to return to Stalin the million
people who had lied from him. The
British government asked for a legal
opinion. (Wonderful quote, Sir Patrick
Dean, legal adviser for the British
Foreign Office: “This is purely a ques
tion for the Soviet authorities and docs
not concern His Majesty’s govern
ment. In due course, all those with
whom the Soviet authorities desire to
deal must be handed over to them, and
we are not concerned with the fact that
they may be shot or otherwise more
harshly dealt with than they might be
under English law.”)
Half a world away, Gen. Douglas
Mac Arth ur was receiving the Japanese
emperor’s surrender. MacArthur said:
“The problem (of enduring peace) is
basically theological and involves
spiritual recrudescences and improve
ment of human character. It must be of
the spirit, if we are to save the flesh.”
Colson asks in his electrifying
book: Whom arc we to learn from?
Patrick Dean, Nietzsche, Freud,
Marx? Or — Cicero, Plato, Adams,
Churchill, Roosevelt and, yes, Christ?
© 1987 l niversal Press Syndicate
