Novel coverage
It never ceases to amaze me how, month after month, you come up with novel coverage of urgent and relevant topics. This one on the technobiology of food is so well done (it happens to be a concern of much interest to me), and the photographs are outstanding and touching.
Margaret Collins
Portland, OR

Resisting despair
Your last issue was so valuable! All of them are but I have been struggling with how not to be immobilized by despair, particularly as Bush unleashes his assault on all that I value.
Margaret Bresee
Marshfield, VT

Poster child for
punishment
Thank you, Mr. Lowenstein, for this story. Tommy's spirit is intact [TW 3/01]. He has a friend and is beloved. He has been blessed. "Poster Boy for Punishment" is alliterative and compelling, but the real story is that he has been redeemed in large part by your love and commitment. Whether he is prisoner or freed man, he is redeemed.
It is a timely piece for me. At 46, the cumulative effect of crime is getting to me in the most existential way. I grew up in the city which boasted of its status as murder capital of America. By the time I was 30 I had known five human beings whose lives were taken by murderers, three randomly, one drug-related, and one domestic. By the time I was 40 my life had been fractured by the violent break-in and subsequent shooting by police of a 16-year-old boy. I had already experienced the terror of an attacker's break-in as a young woman in law school. As a lawyer, my office received bomb threats from an employee's angry husband. I neither sought nor invited any of these experiences. Victimhood is not a club anyone wishes to join EVER. Our society hates weakness. We like tough people, criminals who stand up to "cops" and the criminal justice system and vice versa -- thus the celebration of the criminal world in movies and television. We like stories of victims who publicly outpour forgiveness and get on with it, whatever it is. Per your story, the true victim is the perpetrator drugged and savage, the perpetrator tried and convicted. The rest of us have to keep our lower brainstems in check and our mouths shut. We get to read about the redemption of killers and the uncivilized "vengeance" of the victims' rights movement and their "heinous'' re-interpretation of the crimes committed. I do not see any compassion for the survivors in your work, those whose blood gets super-injected with adrenalin without warning at the emergence of the memory. (But I understand. When I see these angry people on television, even I have to look away.)
I am saddened but, on the other side, you make me care about Tommy. Whether I could care about the one who killed Helen or the one who killed Tracy, I don't think so. I saw their parents and grandparents at the funerals. Their sisters and brothers and friends. Can anyone pay that price in one lifetime? The ones who killed Eddie are unknown to me. The ones who killed Paul and Blair are themselves dead, a much neater solution -- moving on is so much simpler. Parole hearings cut deep into old wounds.
Who should be the Poster Boy for Punishment? I don't know much about the victims' rights movement, but shouldn't they have any? We work to rehabilitate the killer, this is good, but where are the funds for treatment of the wounded? Tommy could buy typewriters for his cellmate. His victims could buy nothing for nobody, but really, is there any amount of money that could stop that terror, that torture that began the night he picked up his gun?
Dear Tommy, go in peace. Return no one evil for evil. If the system has made you a whole and heroic man, amen.
Dona E. Bolding
(via the Internet)