Boomers Buy Babies
Re “The Baby Market” (August): No one seems concerned about what a painful thing it is for a mother to give her baby up for adoption. Rich white baby-boomers don’t care, unless it has to do with them.
In fact, they don’t even seem to focus on the only important thing in an adoption-the baby. The baby has become a thing they want to add to their extensive collection.
Are we supposed to feel sorry for these childless 44-year-olds? What were they doing 15 years ago? Let me guess, working so they could make more money, so they could buy all the right stuff.
So for God’s sake, tell any pregnant teenager you know that they want her baby now. And now that they have the perspective of age and infertility, abortion is out (it sure is bad for the white baby business).
S. HALL
Dallas
The Real Genovese Story
Commenting on a type of paranoia that keeps us from helping people in need, Jim Schutze (“Paranoia and Peanut Butter Sandwiches,” August) summons up the specter of the Kitty Genovese murder in 1964. At that time, he says, he could not understand her neighbors’ callousness in witnessing repeated stabbings by her attacker and yet failing to call the police. Now, he continues, he doesn’t condone their cowardice, but he “does understand it.” Does he really?
I think not. It took Genovese’s knife-wielding killer 35 minutes and three separate assaults to murder her. Why didn’t her 38 neighbors who witnessed all or part of the attacks call the police?
It was not cowardice that kept them away from their phones; it was the assumption that they were hearing a man beat his wife or girlfriend. They were immobilized by the belief that it’s OK for a man to beat his wife or girlfriend.
I was grieved to see a journalist resurrect the inaccurate explanation of this event. Consider this: Every six hours another woman is killed by her abusive partner. Our society has been unable to stop violence against women. I just wish someone would explain why.
Carol J. Adams
Richardson
Dallas Was Riding High
I hate to be the one to spoil Chris Tucker’s remembrances (“My Home Town,” May)…but someone has to do the deed.
The Comet roller coaster would be approximately 45 years old if it were still standing. So his dad could not have ridden the Comet “40 years earlier” than his own childhood rides.
What Tucker’s father rode was the Light-nin’, a heart-stopping rickety old giant erected in the ’20s,
You need someone who can write of Pappy’s Showland, the seven downtown Interstate theaters, old Wee St. Andrew’s, the Accelerators Hot Rod Club, LuAnn’s and the original Dallas Texans of the NFL. You need someone to write of their first ride, as a child, across the viaduct on an old streetcar or Interurban. Now, for a kid, that’s a scary ride.
At one time. Dallas was a hell of a city. Now it’s a hell of a mess!
LARRY CALDER
DALLAS
Hidden Messages
Your map in the “Newcomer’s Guide” (July) distinguished many of the various neighborhoods in North and East Dallas but failed to identify one single neighborhood in Oak Cliff. In Reagan-esque code words you describe the Park Cities and Lakewood as “…exclusive…,” and “…a simpler. kinder lifestyle…” (read white) while you describe Oak Cliff and Southwest Dallas as “…a diverse mix of Hispanic and African-American cultures…” (read minority). You have contributed to the polarization of the races within our city by including these descriptions.
I must borrow Chris Tucker’s apt definition of hathos “…that sense of pleasurable loathing-or loathing pleasure-we get from watching certain schlocky celebrities at work.” It perfectly describes my feeling about your magazine. The image you present is everything I hate about Dallas. Please renew my subscription for another year!
R. DABNEY TOMPKINS
DALLASE
