LETTERS
LETTERS to the Editor What's Best for the Child? As the owner and director of three small preschools for children between the ages of one and four, I have often had to confront the issues Dorothy...
...Finally, she treats us to a scene where her daughter puts not one but five dolls to bed before "riding off to her [real] job...
...While the recall petition was initiated by the controversial White Panther Party, originally because of a sensible handgun-control ordinance that Feinstein had introduced, it garnered support from the city's gay community, furious over Feinstein's veto of an ordinance that would have granted fringe benefits to the non-spousal domestic partners of city employees, regardless of sex...
...If these things come free in Boyce, Virginia, perhaps I'll move there...
...As the owner and director of three small preschools for children between the ages of one and four, I have often had to confront the issues Dorothy Conniff raises in "What's Best for the Child...
...mainstream media's moral degradation and political bias are revealed by the small amount of coverage devoted to the Mozambi-can tragedy...
...Jennifer Hoult New York, New York The editors welcome correspondence from readers on all topics, but prefer to publish letters that comment directly on material previously published in The Progressive...
...Words fail...
...Chester W. Hartman Washington, D.C Mail-Order Brides Apparently The Progressive does not research the institutions that advertise in its classified pages...
...The Rosses were hired by Feinstein to run the get-out-the-vote effort for this special election, and they did their usual fabulous job (which included mailing 70,000 absentee ballots to all of the registered Republicans in the city...
...Leslie Koffler New York, New York What Carol Polsgrove does not consider in "One Mother's Search for Child Care" (November issue) is that women are not mandated to have children and that it is perfectly all right for them to pursue careers...
...Then she has the effrontery to tell us she is planning her child's future—in much the same way that the Soviets plan grain production, I presume...
...But Mozambique's RENAMO insurgents, those darlings of Jesse Helms, Robert Dole, and the Heritage Foundation, have resorted to genocide in their struggle against the "Marxist regime" in Maputo ("Massacre in Mozambique," by Steve Askin, December issue...
...Even Ronald Reagan's State Department sees RENAMO for what it is...
...We have to keep working to find the best possible care for all of our children...
...Under the "Personal" heading, you have been running ads placed by groups that are known to sell Asian women to American men under the heading "mail-order brides...
...So far as the U.S...
...print and broadcast media would react to this hypothetical scenario with tremendous outrage...
...So is a nanny who couldn't care less about her charge, or a home where a mother doesn't want to be with her children and shows it through anger or indifference...
...In my 1984 book, The Transformation of San Francisco, I described the key organizing role Ross and his equally talented son, Fred Jr., played in the 1983 recall election of San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein...
...That may be true of those addicted to the orgy of consumption we call the American Dream...
...Carol Polsgrove Oakland, California Massacre in Mozambique What would be the reaction of the American mass media to the news that the Polish government "had killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, many of them women and children," in an effort to stamp out the Solidarity trade-union movement...
...The city's progressive neighborhood forces also saw the recall election as a chance to undermine the mayor who had become the best friend the downtown developers ever had at city hall...
...What kind of role model is this...
...There is no exalted claptrap about "winning hearts and minds" or "rural development...
...Don Richardson Boyce, Virginia The author replies: Most women I know do have to work—not just to have children or house pets, but to have clothes, food, and housing at even modest levels...
...The murder of a single pro-Solidarity priest in 1984 pushed American newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters into an orgy of anticommunist hysteria...
...All letters may be edited for clarity and conciseness...
...RENAMO's sole aim is to kill enough innocent people and destroy enough property to bring about the collapse of Mozambique's central government...
...Polsgrove, it seems, is willing to impoverish her parents to satisfy her own needs and accommodate imagined peer and societal pressure to reproduce...
...power elite is concerned, the people of Mozambique are a completely expendable commodity...
...Why do some women cling to the schizophrenic notion that they must pay their dues by adding to a world already dying of overpopulation before or while following their true vocation...
...Now, don't tell us all women have to work...
...Naturally, the U.S...
...But if you really have to work, you can't afford a child—or a house pet, either...
...Of course, the Polish government has not resorted to genocide—or to anything even remotely resembling it—in the course of its face-off with Solidarity...
...The uses to which Alin-sky-style organizing talents are put and the political values of super-organizers are interesting topics that could profitably be explored through closer examination of such figures as Fred Ross...
...The U.S...
...Frank W. Goheen Camas, Washington An Organizer's Organizer The legendary Fred Ross ("An Organizer's Organizer," Datelines, December issue) is, indeed, worth praising and publicizing, most notably for his years of hard work in helping to build the United Farm Workers...
...Poorly equipped and poorly staffed group programs for children of any age are inexcusable...
...Angry editorial blasts at "events in Poland" and "events in the Baltic states" are rarely matched by outrage about "events in Mozambique...
...November issue...
...Not until the 1987 election of Art Agnos as mayor and last November's election, which gave the board of supervisors a progressive majority, were neighborhood forces able to reassert themselves over downtown interests...
...By printing these advertisements, you are playing a key marketing role in the whiteslave trade...
...The Rosses' organizing efforts gave Feinstein a smashing victory and made her a shoo-in the following November for her second full term...
...What she is describing is a refugee, not her daughter...
...But Joy Ann Zimmerman's hag-iographic treatment of Ross overlooks some of his less progressive moments...
Vol. 53 • January 1989 • No. 1
