What exactly is the point that the otherwise intelligent and sensitive Rodriguez is making? It's a "race thing" ? How convenient, it seems, that the complexities of the current and past Balkan crisis can be reduced to skin tone. Pardon my lack of sophistication if I can't appreciate the metaphor. His half-hearted history lesson only underscores the continued existence of a "dark underside" in our world at large. Why add to the mire by taking pot shots at churches, language and established order. Change is inevitable, yet it offers no guarantee that the new and improved (multicultural) will be more humane or just.

-- Ron Graziose
Mill Valley, Calif.

Richard Rodriguez's take on Europe was so bizarre it made me laugh out loud like a lunatic for 10 minutes. I'm surprised he didn't finish off the article with " ... and now children, the moral of the story is: White people are evil and all the poor, oppressed victims of the Eurocentric Devil Religion will one day inherit the Earth." Will someone please set Camille Paglia on this guy.

-- Joe Stocker
London

The working mom myth
BY SHARI THURER
(04/06/99)

Shari Thurer dismisses those who study differences between children of nonworking and working mothers as "hair splitters" who ought to spend their time solving "real" problems like crumbling schools and drug addiction. Fine, but from where does she suppose these problems arise? Teen pregnancy, drug addiction and gang violence occur across the religious, ethnic and financial spectrums. Yet a glaring commonality of life in the United States is that the majority of families no longer have a stay-at-home parent. Of course we should continue studying this. If we can better determine both positive and negative effects, then families can make better decisions, alleviate any unnecessary guilt and try to compensate for problems that come with this type of living situation. If Thurber took her own advice and set aside her own particular agenda, she might see that.

-- Erin Strathmann
San Francisco

Working moms can never rest easy because the next study purporting to show that an employed mother is the root of all evil is inevitably around the corner. Right-wing think tanks can't fund enough of those things, no matter how flawed the research might need to be. Shari Thurer is right: The people who demonize welfare moms (who have the hardest time getting adequate day care) for not working are the same people who can't bear to think of a middle-class mom escaping the kitchen and nursery.

The only solution is a thick skin. I've promised myself that next time I read about a study showing how working moms are the bane of society (funded by the Heritage Foundation or some other right-wing outfit), I'll just shrug before I put the kids on the school bus and I pick up my briefcase to head to work.

-- Ivonne Rovira
Louisville, Ky.
salon.com | April 12, 1999

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