Make them wear beacons

(About searches for lost climbers:) Every airplane must carry a crash locator beacon, a very small, inexpensive transmitter that can be picked up and located by air. Why not every mountain climber?

LaVerne M. Johnson, Corvallis

When pacifism is surrender

Your front page editorial on Michele Darr saddened me ("Activist," Dec. 24). The opinion piece would have been more accurate if, instead of labeling her an "activist," you had labeled her a "suicidalist."

When pacifists like Darr rant condescendingly that war is not an acceptable way to solve problems, imagine that it is 1861 and you are a slave in Mississippi. Imagine that it is 1939 and you are a Jew in Poland. Imagine that it is 1988 and you are a Kurd in Iraq. Imagine that it is 2001 and you work in the World Trade Center.

War, as a response to evil, is better than letting evil prevail. To argue otherwise, as Darr evidently does, is to be morally confused.

As a spiritual concept, peace is certainly the ideal human state we all desire. But as a political concept, peace is an inadequate state in a world populated with terrorists committed to our (including Darr's) destruction. Pacifism, in response to evil, leads to submission or certain death. Darr's blank check pacifism is not activism. It is surrender at best, suicidalism at worst.

Gordon L. Shadle, Albany

Thinking about abortions, war

Abortion has been legal for most of the 46 years of my life. Most of that time, I haven't thought about it much. I figured it prevented serious problems. And since I'm not religious, I couldn't say whether an embryo has a soul any more than I can say that I do.

But lately, the legality of mid- and late-term abortions disturbs me. I see pictures of exquisitely formed mid-term fetuses and think about what abortion does to them. I have seen a tiny premature baby and she could have easily been destroyed as born. It makes me shudder. I'm not religious but I do believe in the sanctity of all human life.

It's been all this debate on the morality of killing people to preempt foreign problems that has got me thinking about the morality of killing innocents to preempt domestic problems. Shouldn't both require proof of imminent danger? How can we tolerate one and not the other?

My friends comfort me that mid- and late-term abortions are rare. Well "rare" is relative. A fraction of a percent of 40 million abortions is still thousands. For privacy's sake, we don't even keep count. What is a tolerable amount of death for a higher cause? Is it a few thousand soldiers or a few thousand babies? Maybe "staying the course" isn't a good idea here either. Maybe it's time we also had an exit strategy for abortion. Maybe there isn't a good kind of preemptive killing.

Frank DeMonte, Corvallis

A violent area, then as now

I was bothered after reading a certain letter in, I believe, Sunday's paper.

It's true our Bible does include the Old Testament, which can be violent, not leaving anything out of where our history came from. God warning the Jews a "messiah" was coming. We must remember the time when the Old Testament was written. Then as well as now, that area is a violent area to live.

We learned by being passive on Sept. 11, 2001, nice does not always work. As a Christian we do try to be passive, and we are commanded to be like lambs, not lions.

Christianity is also the only religion that realizes we are just human and we need a perfect savior to have a relationship with a perfect God. It can't be earned by our corrupt human minds. We don't have God's wisdom. We are supposed to use the tools God gives us, like in the book of Romans, Chapter 13.

James Stahlnecker, Albany