Readers of the Headline, and Story, Respond

DEAR EDITOR: I don't care what the f***k you write inside your paper, but putting the F-word on your [May 9] cover was offensive and irresponsible. At first I thought you must be desperate. Then I read the explanation on your Web page where you claim that nonreaders were the ones offended. Now I'm not sure if you're desperate or clueless or dishonest. Your cover is offensive to nearly everyone. I was amazed by your poor judgment in posting an obscenity in thousands of newspaper boxes across town.

DEAR EDITOR: Your cover is socially irresponsible. Your paper or its designers are ignorant to the fact that your paper is in full view of 5- and 6-year-old children who are learning to read and write. They are in stores, in coffee shops, and in family grocery stores. But you know this, so obviously you don't care, right? This socially irresponsible choice joins a million others and is the reason we Americans are hated so much. Your ignorance adds to the collective consciousness that breeds terrorism and hatred towards us. In this country it's starting to become a blessing if one is born blind.

DEAR EDITOR: While just about everyone quoted in Huan Hsu's story ["Blame it on Becca," May 9]—judges, lawyers, guidance counselors, mentors—seemed to agree the truant students are to blame, it may be useful to ask, "What's wrong with the schools?" The answer might be found in the words of the Seattle School District representative who lectured one kid, "The most important thing is to learn to do things you don't want to do, because that's what you're going to do for the rest of your life." If that's the prevailing attitude, can you really blame the kid for not wanting to go to school?

DEAR EDITOR: Huan Hsu's well-reported piece on truancy prosecutions under the Becca Bill does an excellent job describing the gap between the wishful thinking underlying such prosecutions and the reality of how youth experience their encounters with the court system. However, the article lets those who adhere to the Becca Bill mythology off easy when it notes that "King County's juvenile arrest rate has dropped by nearly a third" since the law was enacted, as if these two events have anything to do with each other. Washington's success in this important policy area is much more reliably linked to its commitment to evidence-based programs than to its reliance on courts to address truancy. It is also worth noting that juvenile crime rates have fallen dramatically across the country over this same period and other states have not needed Becca-like bills to experience these improvements.

DEAR EDITOR: True education promotes growth and expands not only the mind but also the heart of the pupil. If students are not touched in some way by what they are taught, then the teaching is inadequate. And to threaten with jail the child who persists in bringing this inadequacy to our attention is to abandon ourselves to the plainest barbarism.

DEAR EDITOR: Re: "Should Kids Serve Time for Skipping School?" Yes. It offers them the opportunity to see what "lifestyle" lies ahead for them if they continue in the direction they're currently taking. They can see firsthand the "happiness" that a life on public assistance affords. If they're wise, they'll choose the alternative of finishing school and getting a job.

DEAR EDITOR: Thank you for your article on the Seattle Housing Authority's unfair grievance hearings for Section 8 tenants ["Authority Always Wins," May 9]. The Housing Authority should be ashamed of itself for wasting its dollars on a lawsuit when it could simply alter its policies to allow for due process of residents. That money should go toward providing housing for low-income people. Isn't that the mission of SHA in the first place?

DEAR EDITOR: I must object to the way your article used the word "Kafkaesque" to describe SHA's hearing process. This is unfair to Kafka, and far too generous to SHA. Sure, Kafka's novels depict bureaucratic procedures so obtuse they become tortuous. And I'm convinced SHA's hearing procedure in fact rises to the necessary standard of unfairness and obscurantism. However, the following differences are just as important:

1. Kafka was handicapped by self-doubt, and obsessed over every word. SHA, by contrast, is dangerously self-assured and runs their eviction hearings as if they can do no wrong.

2. Kafka was deeply humble, even asking for his writings to be destroyed upon his death. SHA, by contrast, seems to have an imperial mind-set, with massive redevelopment projects all over the city and a hearing process as closed to dissenting voices as they can get away with.

3. Growing up in a Jewish family in Prague, Kafka experienced a complex combination of inclusion in the culture of the city and exclusion from it, contributing to a fascinating insider/outsider sensibility in his work. By contrast, in SHA's eyes, they're the insiders, and they do the excluding—no subtlety or complexity about it.