
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, November 10, 1994                   TAG: 9411100032
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-16   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WHERE HAVE OUR VALUES GONE?

YES, Virginia, there really is a devil. That was my thought when I heard that the two children in Union, S.C., were killed by their mother. There is hardly a day goes by without hearing about parents killing their children, children killing their parents, or children killing children. I hear about pro-life vs. pro-choice. What pro-choice?

I married at 16 years of age, had my first baby at 18, and two more by age 25. Not one of these was planned. I considered them gifts from God. Neither I nor my husband had a high-school education, but we dug in, worked hard, and saw to it that our children got one.

This wasn't 100 years ago, only 30. Where have our values gone? What's happened to society? You really can't blame everything on government leadership. We have the freedom to choose how we live. So why not pro-God, pro-moral values?

PHYLLIS SIMMONS

BUCHANAN

Contaminated water everywhere

AN EXTENSIVE study of herbicides in drinking water, released on Oct. 18 by the Environmental Working Group and Physicians for Social Responsibility, found that 14 million Americans in 14 states are drinking water contaminated by five cancer-causing herbicides. Virginia is one of the states. Most of these herbicides enter water supplies in agricultural runoff from land used to raise animals for human consumption. And herbicides and other pesticides are only one category of pollutants carried by agricultural runoff.

Until current Administrator Carol M. Browner took over, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had largely ignored the agricultural runoff problem for economic and political reasons. Blocking the flow would be very costly due to the enormous areas involved. Browner's efforts to overhaul the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act were killed in the 103rd Congress by the meat industry's opposition.

Since 90 percent of agricultural land is used for growing animal feed, even a small reduction in the national consumption of animal products would allow producers to plant the most erosion-prone land with erosion-resistant trees, shrubs and grasses. The only other option is to give up drinking water and practicing water recreation.

JACK NORRIS

BLACKSBURG

Political coverage was fair, informative

AS THIS ridiculous political season has finally met its merciful and long-overdue end, a word of thanks should be extended to your newspaper for the extensive and fair coverage it gave the candidates, especially the senatorial candidates. The partisan supporters of each of those in the running will challenge that statement, of course, but one doesn't waste one's time trying to have a reasoned conversation with zealots, no matter to which party they belong.

In separate news articles, you spotlighted each candidate, warts and all. And I benefited from your ``Q and A'' columns that posed the same question to each senatorial candidate. If a voter didn't know where each one stood after such coverage, that voter probably shouldn't have voted.

As a responsible newspaper, you took your stand on the candidates, totally displeasing the ones not chosen, causing their followers to raise cries of bias, murder, bad breath and so forth. But in this particular time of emotionalism, many of us find your newspaper to be a voice of reason and tolerance at this end of the state. May the election of 1994 soon be nothing but an unpleasant memory.

FRANK WILLIAMSON

COVINGTON

When families were not in the gravy

I READ with a chuckle how Lydia A. Nayo associated cornflakes with her poverty-stricken childhood (Oct. 23 commentary, ``Rise from poverty brings freedom from cornflakes'').

I, too, have memories of poverty in the Shenandoah Valley during the Great Depression. Cornflakes cereal was a luxury my widowed mother could afford only on special occasions - like every couple of months.

Our breakfast consisted of gravy and bread. Some mornings we had bread and gravy! One morning when my mother and older sister were out feeding the chickens on our small poultry farm, my other sister and I had a disagreement. We knocked the skillet of gravy off the stove, and it landed upside down on the kitchen floor. We came to an immediate truce. Knowing our mother would wale the daylights out of us if she found out, we scooped the gravy into the skillet and put it back on the stove. Needless to say, my sister and I skipped gravy that morning and went for apple butter and bread.

We raised all our food and traded eggs for salt, pepper and sugar at a local store.

Sometime during the winter, our mother would decide the supply of potatoes wasn't going to last until the next harvest. She would then start making potato soup to stretch the supply. We had potato soup day in and day out. To this day, I can't stand it.

Cornflakes isn't poverty; potato soup is.

FRED LANDIS

ROANOKE

by CNB