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NORTHWEST HERALD S.ctlon B Saturday. S.pt.mtxr 7, IHI P»ga 3 Opinion Concorde's on its way it'** \ . htv Q* . Rockford is set to make Illinois state history next month when a Concorde jet will fly into its airport. As of last week, no Concorde flights have landed in Illinois. Re­ portedly, plans to fly into O'Hare Int'l Airport were shelved because of heavy opposition from surround­ ing suburbs. Federal laws prohibit the air- Craft from flying at supersonic speeds over U.S.. land. However, the jet has been reported to be noisier than conventional aircraft during takeoff and landing. There would be a lot of money involved if an airport were to re­ ceive daily Concorde flights. The real question is if the number of trans-Atlantic Concorde flights would support a daily schedule in the Midwest. That's an unknown. Those connected with Concorde flights want to fly into O'Hare. It is a transportation hub, and without some kind of access to that air­ port, the airlines with a Concorde are limiting the plane's potential. We're sure that the noisejrom those groups opposing the^ Con­ corde landings would be drowned out by the jingling of cash from daily nights. Maybe this scheduled landing at Rockford's airport is meant to force the issue with the O'Hare authorities. It could be that by showing O'Hare that another nearby airport will receive Con­ corde flights, the flights' operators hope to crush opposition from O'Hare's critics. Will it work? We wouldn't bet against it. Rockford's airport may be a pawn in the game; , Regardless, the Rockford air­ port is benefiting from O'Hare's obstinance. • 'Even if only temporarily. 5it- Ifr. I " . A look at truth and poverty t: Isr. 4*"V ::: £r I ran into my liberal acquaint­ ance Hubert Humbug in a neigh­ borhood tavern the other day. He was knocking them back pretty fast, and looked as if he'd lost his last friend. I inquired, diplomati­ cally, what the trouble was. "Did you see the Census Bureau report?" he demanded. "Which report?" "The one on the poverty rate," he rteplied. "The number of people living below the poverty line dropped from 35.5 million in 1983 to 33.7 million in 1984." "Well, but that's good, isn't it?" "For the poor, maybe. But not for the Democratic Party or the cause of liberalism! My gosh, with inflation at only 3 percent a year, and interest rates still going down, and unemployment back down to Where it was when Jimmy Carter left office, what's left to complain about economically?" "Maybe the deficits?" I suggest­ ed. The poor guy was so down it seemed only decent to offer some hope. But Hubert refused to be consoled. "People are a little worried by the deficits," he conceded, "but they don't affect most people di­ rectly -- anyway, not yet. Besides, people just don't take seriously the idea that liberal Democrats would do anything effective to reduce the deficit. Good grief," he exclaimed, "those big deficits may actually help the Republicans!" "Well," I said reassuringly, "there are still lots of poor people, and they're all on your side." "Don't be too sure," he retorted gloomily. "Have you seen the Jun­ e/July issue of Public Opinion magazine?" "No. What does it say?" "Nothing good. According to a Los Angeles Times poll the maga­ zine reports on, 59 percent of the American people think welfare benefits make poor people depen­ dent and encourage them to stay poor." "Yeah, but what (to the poor people themselves think?" "Forty-three percent of them agree," he groaned. "Well," I argued, "57 percent of WIlflAM X. RUSHER zJ them disagree..." "Wrong," he corrected me. "Only 31 percent of them disagree. The rest either don't know or think welfare benefits have no effect on motivation. And that's not all!" "What else?" "Fifty-four percent of Ameri­ cans think jobs are available for anyone willing to work." "And you mean to tell me the poor..." "Thirty^one percent of them agree." 1 was stunned into silence. Final­ ly Hubert went on. "Apparently, # living in poverty can give a person a very: different attitude toward welfare. When the poll asked whether poor young worsen deliberately have babies so they can collect welfare payments, 49 percent of the public as a whole said 'often,' 47 percent said 'sel­ dom,' and 4 percent didn't know. But among women below the pov­ erty line, believe it or not, 70 per­ cent said 'often,' only 20 percent said 'seldom,' and 10 percent didn't know. "What's more," he sighed, "only 5 percent of the poor said that when poverty programs failed it was because they weren't given enough money to make them work. Thirty-eight percent said the pro­ jects were useless ones that didn't help the poor, and 50 percent said the money in the failed projects was intercepted and never got to the people who need it. "Do they know something 1 don't know?" Hubert mused aloud. '^Have we been wrong all along?" I kept quiet and let him think about it. (William Rusher is a columnist for N e w s p a p e r E n t e r p r i s e Association) mm Ft BLMffitfVffeK? w NORTHWEST HERALD "The evil that men do lives after them." William Shakespeare ROBERTA. SHAW Editor and Publisher LEONARDM. INGRASSIA Executive Editor STEVEN H. HUNTER Marketing Director KAREN A. ANDROS Saturday Editor < MICHAEL E. MORSCH News Editor/Regional OENN IS M. McNAMARA Editorial Page Editor RONALD L. STANLE Y Circulation Director AMD NOW, OBSERVE HOW REMARKABLY WELL SHE STANDS UP DO A. LISION! £ 1YUG §> Considering the AIDS questions On the whole matter of AIDS and the evolution of a public policy toward AIDS sufferers, the think­ ing is, surely, incomplete and tend­ ing toward the ideological, rather than the practical. What we see happening, as Mr. Joseph Sobran has pointed out, is the phenomenon of victimology. It has become a habit to fix sights on a victim -- unwed mother, orphan, unwanted child, refugee, cripple, unem- loyed, diabetic -- and the victim ereupon becomes the locus of ws, regulations, biases, atti­ tudes, whatever. If Dorothy Parker had written a generation later, somebody would have come out for establishing a National In­ stitution to Make Passes at Girls Who Wear Glasses. All of which is not to diminish by the least one's concerji for victims -- yes, victims -- of AIDS. And although a tribunal somewhere is likely to distinguish between the sufferer who got AIDS because he patronized a homosexual bath­ house five times a week and the 10- year-old boy who is discovered suf­ fering from AIDS because of a dirty needle, society shouldn't be asked to make different rules for the two sets of sufferers. They have AIDS or they do not have AIDS is the question. But the rush to stipulate correct standards of conduct for those who do not have AIDS toward those who do have AIDS raises questions not only of the rights of the vic­ tims, but of the rights of non-suf­ ferers. Los Angeles recently swept into law a noble edict making it a legal offense to discriminate in ag& way against an AIDS sufferer, which is all very well but somehow reminds us, does it not, of those high and mighty tribunals who pass laws forbidding discrimina­ tion in the public schools on Mon- ' - ' s" day, and on Tuesday withdraw their children to send them to a private school. We need to remember that tender loving care by parents is not necessarily something we de­ sire to condemn, even if it is not always rational. The mother who doesn't let her little girl cross the street unescorted until she is 11 years old might be the subject of a Harvard seminar on how she is causing her little girl to become a psychological cripple. But we are not -- yet --Jnta mood to tell the mother at what point her concern William F. Buckley for her child's safety becomes an act of social aggression, or a dimi­ nution of the right of others. The point about AIDS Is that there is a whole lot we do not know about it. A week or two ago the doctors told us that it is in fact detectable in human tears. But then they rush to tell us that mere­ ly because it is detectable in hu­ man tears does not mean that it is communicable by human tears. And we nod our head, perhaps wondering only how come, it took so long for the doctors to find out that it was in fact traceable In human tears. In fact, it wasn't until a couple of months ago that ' the doctors found out that they can detect whether there is AIDS in a blood bank 99.4 percent of the time, which is terrific for everyone except those who take the remain­ ing 0.6 percent of the blood. To­ morrow we will find out something else, beyond the vague business about how AIDS is only known to be communicable through sexual Intercourse (once? twice? 100? the story even here is not clear) and contaminated needles -- how else? By no other means? Well, then, how come .they acted as they did in Paris? There you may have read (In the small print?) when Rpck Hudson was discharged, all the nurses who at­ tended to him -- and this was In a modern hospital, not at a witch doctor's hut -- were made to burn their dresses. The patient was fed on paper and plastic plates, with plastic forks and spoons -- which were destroyed. So what, a non-hysterical mother is entitled to ask herself, Is a Paris hospital up to, safeguarding the hygiene of nurses ana doctors and hospital employees, that she should not also be up to safeguard­ ing the hygiene of Suzy and Johnny who are asked to go to school and share meals, and games, and rough and tumble, with someone suffering from AIDS? The point of the query is this, that compassion for the AIDS victim cannot reason­ ably be asked to exhaust the entire agenda of human concern. There has got to be understandable con­ cern for the mother anxious about her child, for the restaurant owner anxious about his clients. Is this a summons to quaran­ tine? No. But It Is a summons to attempt to understand not only the feelings of victims, but the feelings of those who fear that they, too, or those they protect, might become victims. (William Buckley is a columnist for Universal Press Syndicate) Reader Forum Leftist propaganda To the Editor: The article about "War-torn Nicaragua," published in your Aug. 21 edition, was one of the most blatantly obvious pieces of leftist propaganda that I have read since the Vietnam War. The article con­ tained the usual emotionalfV loaded words and phrases generally bandied abQut by the ultraliberals on the sub­ ject of U.S. involvement anywhere in the world. Things such as "rape and torture imposed by the contras," and "the contras viciously killed an adult education teacher/' or "a big lie be- Mng told Americahs" convey the im­ pression that the contras are vicious animals and that we are imbeciles for believing the "lies" of our government. The sponsoring group, Witness for Peace, is not a simple grassroots Christian grassroots organization. Rather, they appear to be part of the "religious left" that is dedicated to opposing U.S. policy everywhere in the world. Ms. Peppen tacitly admits that she already had formed her opi­ nion about U.S. involvement, so how can their visit be characterized as a "personal fact-finding mission." Their bucolic description of the "parades, fiestas and pagentry" and how "things are so much better than they were under the Somoza family" reminded me of Jane Fonda's glow­ ing broadcasts from Hanoi about the humane treatment our POW's were receiving or about how well the Rhymer Rouge were running Cam­ bodia right after they conquered it. They never said anything about the relentless drift of the Sandinistas to a regime Modeled upon that of Castro and of the suppression of the opposi­ tion political parties. Neither did they say that'the San­ dinistas undertook a massive military buildup well before the con­ tras even existed as an organized op­ position force. Nor do they say that the Nicaraguan economy is in trou­ ble because of their own govern­ ment's interference in it. Mr. Mateyko and Ms. Poppen apparently do not remember the tactics used by the Viet Cong against the govern­ ment hamlets during the Vietnam War; the VC certainly were not try­ ing to win over the people when they undertook a campaign to murder every local village leader in every village in the south. The ultralibs us­ ed to call that "liberation" or part of the "people's revolution" back then. War is never beautiful; it is always ugly, and the Sandinistas are equally guilty of such atrocities, most notably agains the villages that sup­ port the contras. To fixate only on the contras is again part of the pro­ paganda campaign. Write u»! ~ Send letters to Reader Forum The Herald, ' 7803 PyOtt Road Crystal Lake IL 60014. Letters must be signed and give the author's ad' dress and telephone number for the editor's reference. We recommend letters of 300 words or less. All let­ ters are subject to editing for clari­ ty and brevity. The facts are that the contras are succeeding, in spite of a cutoff of all U.S. government aid, military or humanitarian (not a dime of the re­ cent appropriation has been given to them yet). They must have some popular support or they would have long ago been made Impotent. I resent their characterization of t h e m s e l v e s a s " p e a c e a m ­ bassadors." I also object to such ob­ vious propaganda. GImme a break! )• James C.Zoes Woodstock Imperial Scots To the Editor: A salute to the Imperial Scots! I think this group is worth seeing and writing about. There are 117 in the group, Including two drum majors. Their ages are Hrom incoming freshmen to 21 years old. They repre­ sent Crystal Lake, Hampshire, Lake in the Hills, Carpentersville, Dundee, Sleepy Hollow and Gilberts. (Hope I didn't miss anyone.) They have traveled to Michigan, Indiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois. Their last parade for the summer Is Saturday, Sept. 14, in Elgin. Its not too far, and believe me, its worth seeing them. Of course, I'm especially proud as my granddaughter is one of the group. I'm sure there are a lot more parents and grandparents who are just as proud. KatberineHay Woodstock -