Agenda being pushed
Re Arkansas Right to Life's Memorial Garden, recently written about in the Arkansas Catholic, where it was announced there will be a memorial garden specifically established for women to mourn the loss of their aborted children: A memorial for lost children is a wonderful, touching idea. However, the idea of having a memorial garden specifically for the lives lost to abortion is disrespectful, insulting and hurtful to those of us who have lost children through miscarriage, stillbirth, or death; it seems more like a way to push an agenda than to offer a place to heal.
Instead of limiting the garden, why not open it up to all parents who have lost children, no matter what the cause? I think this gesture of including all children is the most moral, tasteful, and respectable thing to do. Perhaps removing the restrictive nature of the specific cause of death (abortion) will open up the healing garden to more parents who need a place to grieve the loss of their child.
LISA CHONGRIS
North LIttle Rock
Impediment to world
Commercialism and human greed are an impediment to a civilized society. Our natural resources are rapidly disappearing. Many of our great forests are being destroyed to minister to our greed and gluttony. We poison our air, soil and water, all for the sake of commercialism. Only a fool would call this progress. We are like parasites devouring our host.
The marketplace has robbed humanity of its natural soul and true spirituality. It's been said that America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
The idea of shopping has taken on a sacred permanence that defies all reason and common sense. We spend a large part of our short life doing work we dislike in order to buy things we do not need. The dull, uncultivated mind is interested in scarcely anything beyond the sensations of the body in which it dwells. We are a society tainted to the roots by the poison of commercialism.
Corporations, whose agenda is greed, just call this "good business."
I believe anyone who thinks that our expanding economy can keep living standards rising indefinitely in a finite world is either delusional or an idiot. No doubt our grandchildren will pay an enormous price for our so-called high standard of living.
The corporate world will continue to invest in the business of war and will reap the financial rewards, and so humanity will again fail to create a moral, ethical and enlightened society.
AL CASE
Enola
When is it all enough?
A brief history of human unkind: Some people got upset and killed some other people which made some other people angry who killed some other people which made some other people mad who killed some other people which made all the people go mad killing each other while other people laughed all the way to the bank.
Beware the wolf in sheep's clothing. Those who live by the sword, die by the sword. Blessed are the peacemakers. What, then, of the peace-mockers? When do we mature enough to say enough is enough?
DAN VEGA
Fayetteville
Light in the darkness
Just four little words. One short sentence.
But to me they are the most poignant words in the Bible. They were penned by the Apostle John in his gospel when he tells of Judas leaving Jesus and the rest of the 12 to do his dirty deed.
"And it was night," John writes. I am sure he intended to convey more in those words than the simple fact that it was nighttime. It was, in addition, borrowing the words of another John, the 16th Century Saint John of the Cross, "the dark night of the soul." The darkest night of human history. The dark night when humankind rejected the humble teacher from Galilee.
He was simply too good, too kind, too gentle to be allowed to live among men who could not abide his simple lifestyle or his simple message. The paradoxical fact that it had to happen so that individuals might be reconciled to the Father does not detract from the darkness of the event.
Nighttime has long been the time when evil does its best work. The absence of light that provides a mask for lawlessness. Fanciful terrors and superstitious horrors breed and proliferate in the darkness, not of night only, but of the soul as well. So much so that certain centuries of the past have been dubbed The Dark Ages.
How different might it have been had men chosen the light instead of the dark? One can only speculate. And how tempting it is to merely stand and curse the crowding darkness rather than search for a candle.
JOHN McPHERSON
Searcy
Not very conservative
Planned Parenthood is a major supplier of contraception to the young and poor. They also provide sexually transmitted disease education, diagnosis and treatment, and cancer screening. I realize that defunding this agency does not usually affect the families of lawmakers. I think they should consider the consequences.
I have for a long time thought that jobs and unemployment are supply/demand-driven. That is, if we produce 8 percent more workers than we need, we have 8 percent unemployment. I grant that we should have considered this 20-plus years earlier. This does not mean we should not be doing all we can to make more jobs. I also see that many in our prisons would not be there if they could find legitimate jobs.
I believe defunding Planned Parenthood will increase disease problems and births for the poor and cause more problems by increased birth rates secondary to lack of contraception. It will have little effect on abortions. It will cause increased payments in the future for Medicaid and other social support programs and I suspect for our penal system as well.
If Planned Parenthood is defunded, it will be lawmakers who call themselves "conservatives" being totally not conservative!
FRANK THIBAULT
Benton
Editorial on 03/28/2015