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Letters

Social welfare helps foster poverty

It's a shame Mike Schwartz in his article "Welfare reform takes money, livelihood from poor people" (Viewpoint, April 5) doesn't understand what many of us do. The only way to prevent selfish adults from knowingly - and this is important - knowingly bringing children into abject poverty is to limit welfare benefits.

How long can hardworking taxpayers make their 9-to-5 while, in New York City, "advocates" sit by as 16-year-old girls are placed into subsidized apartments?

What kind of world does Schwartz envision, where children raise children - only to see those children fill our prisons and shelters.

What does Schwartz care if generations of black and brown people are stuck in a welfare cycle and public housing, endowed with no skills and no education?

Why should Schwartz care if our cities crumble as the tax base shrinks and social service spending soars?

He can make allusions to student loans, grants and mortgage tax breaks as "welfare," but that sneaky red herring will never resonate with the American people - we know what we mean by ending welfare: we encourage home ownership and advanced education, while discouraging splintered families and irresponsible social engineering.

Schwartz should do his research: for the first time in America, we have more minorities on welfare than whites, far exceeding their percentage of the general population. This would be irrelevant, but Schwartz wants to score points with his divisive color arguments.

Schwartz and I do agree on one issue: corporate welfare should be trimmed away as much as possible, though, corporations, unlike welfare mooches, give something to the community - be it jobs, products or services.

Oh yeah, and they pay taxes, too.

Jeff Abelson

New York City resident

Atrocities in Kosovo necessitate action

In his recent column, "U.S. action in Kosovo harms, not helps" (Viewpoint, April 7), Jonah Lalas complains of Clinton's "misleading" comparison of Slobodan Milosevic to Adolf Hitler. But he perpetuates his own misleading comparison by likening the current conflict in Kosovo to the Vietnam War.

The truth is, both analogies serve only to falsely simplify what is a decidedly complex situation.

Lalas asks, "What exactly are our national interests in the region?" as if to suggest that without national interests we have no right to interfere in the affairs of a sovereign nation.

But the question of rights can be recast as a question of obligations: "What obligations do we Americans, as human beings, have toward other human beings?"

Ignoring the plight of the Kosovar Albanians is tantamount to ignoring the domestic violence occurring in the apartment next door. Sure I could say, "It's none of my business," but I couldn't help feeling ashamed of that response.

Lalas and others rightly point out that the United States has remained silent during past human rights abuses in Tibet, Africa, East Timor and elsewhere. I cannot excuse this inconsistency in U.S. foreign policy.

But the United States' past failings cannot be construed as a precedent for inaction in the face of future atrocities.

The United States has the authority to intervene in the affairs of another country in order to prevent human rights abuses; and so do Russia, Great Britain, China, Guatemala - even Serbia.

I can only wish that some foreign power had stepped in to stop our wholesale eradication of Native Americans, or our universally intolerable treatment of African Americans through most of the 20th century. To remain silent in the face of evil is complicity an evil.

Lalas may be correct in suggesting that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) intervention has backfired, accelerating the "ethnic cleansing" rather than stalling it. But alternatives are in short supply.

Sanctions and the "bad public relations" strategy advocated by Lalas would simply take too long to take effect. Action, even if it ultimately proves ineffective, is essential, if only so we can say that we didn't sit idly by while hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians were persecuted and murdered.

For once (thank God) we can say "We tried."

Dan Connolly

Graduate student

Film

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