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The Down-side of Ducks

There is more happening in the U-District than just studying, eating at oriental restaurants, and panhandling street kids. Where I work, there appeared a pair of mallard ducks last year, and they returned again this year! We feed them and give them water. Pedestrians and customers alike are amazed to see wildlife that is not human in a maze of cars, bikes, and foot traffic.

The down side is that there is always some asshole that tries to scare them, threaten to eat them, or let their kids or dogs go after them. Come on, people! In this fucked-up world, it's nice to see something other than the everyday crap that we call life in the city. Let's hear it for the ducks!!

Pat the Barber, Seattle

He Forgot The Processing Fee

Dear EATidor,

The dissection of the "Times" editorial, concerning the pitiless slaughter of the hostage-taking MRTA terrorists, was right to the point. But really, criticizing the "Times" editorials is, literally, beating up on a moral cripple. These people endorsed Jack Metcalf and Linda Smith, twice. I cannot think of a worse thing to say about them than that!

Kudos on the "protean inhabiter" joke in the April Fools' Day edition. It takes a determined punster indeed to come up with a good pun on a scientific term.

While I'm flattered to have three letters printed-- does this make me a Triple Clown?-- I'm afraid the Firesign Theatre sounds better in sound. I'm sure that check enclosed with the letter had NOTHING to do with your decision to print it!

Slurp,

Tensor, Seattle

White Light/White Heat

A few weeks back, the first ever academic conference on "whiteness" took place in Berkeley. While the premise of the conference--that the idea of a "white" race is as much a social, historical, and ideological concept as a biological one, and deserves critical attention--was quite reasonable, general reactions in the press ranged from polite incredulity to outright mockery.

A recent article in the Times, however, points to the need for more, not less, of such critical thinking. Titled "Canada seen as terrorists' haven" (5/4/97), it discusses the claim by security and intelligence officials that Canada makes life easy for terrorists. Part of the problem, it says, is that nations, like Canada, with "big ethnic populations" have trouble pursuing suspected terrorists without stereotyping "minorities."

The problem with this way of thinking is it fails to recognize that everybody belongs to some ethnic group, whether WASP or Yoruba or French-Canadian. In other words, every nation on earth has a population that is 100% "ethnic."

The article promotes the dangerous illusion that "we" are just "normal," and only people who are different from "us" are "ethnic." Typically, "us" means people who occupy positions of power--police, government officials, and so on. This self-centered myopia has real world consequences. Arab-Americans, for instance, were automatically suspected in the Oklahoma City bombing, which everyone now assumes was carried out by "white" Americans. Let's not forget, too, that vicious ethnic hatred, embodied in racist novel The Turner Diaries, is supposed to have played an important part in the motivation for the bombing. More attention to that ethnicity called "white" might help us to stop assuming it's synonymous with "normal."

We all have at least one ethnicity. The sooner we recognize that, the sooner we start thinking about what this means and how it influences our perceptions and our actions, the sooner "we" stop taking "us" for granted--the better.

Davis Oldham, Seattle