Editor,

This letter is not to convey a coherent point, rather it is to comment on a few stories from your 30 March 2001 issue. To begin with, I’d like to compliment "Foreign Correspondent" Amanda Baber on the best written stories in TSL. They are humorous without the vulgarity found in many of your stories. I’m not moralizing, I just think excessive vulgarities merely cover up literary weakness in an attempt to get a cheap laugh. To the point, though, while most pieces in TSL are average quality at best, Ms. Baber’s columns stick out like diamonds in a cluster of rhinestones. As for the letter from the editor, I think Ms. Lawrence missed one very important aspect of the situation. To paraphrase her, she wrote that since the colleges try to promote a sense of community by dealing with matters, up to and including sexual assault, in house, CUC shouldn’t have called the cops on the BFS protesters. She misses, though, that the protesters were the first to take this issue to the outside world with their protest and its subsequent media attention. Ms. Lawrence points out that the longer the protesters blocked Pendleton, the more negative publicity CUC would receive. It doesn’t seem to dawn on her, though, that the fact that there is negative publicity is a result of the protesters already taking their case outside of the five college community. Earlier in the issue Andrew Cvitanovich wrote an opinion that "we will run out of oil soon." His criticisms of dubya aside, the opinion should have been deemed too unsupported to merit printing. He cites numbers on how much oil is left and how quickly it will be used up, but nowhere says where these numbers came from. As with any political issue, there are widely varying numbers. Normally there are two sets of numbers–one favoring the conservatives and one favoring the liberals. Sometimes is a third, more centrist set, but there are always at least two sets of numbers. We are given no clue as to where these numbers come from and thus it is hard to give them credibility.

Sincerely,

C. Apollo Morgan

Claremont McKenna College