There are so many examples of insidious mind control that we could never cover them all. Advertising, politics, "community standards" - many of them try to pose as establishing ethical models for us to follow; Others are transparent self-preservationists. The Southern Baptist Church, the largest protestant denomination in the world (of which I am a recovering member/victim), decided to boycott the Disney corporation because 1) they didn't like some of their movies and 2) because they didn't like the fact that Disney provided spousal insurance benefits to homosexual couples. Doesn't sound like any Christian ethic that I know of. As to transparent self-preservation, we had a nationally embarassing incident here in Columbia, South Carolina last week, in which the principal of Irmo High School retracted approval he had already given for a concert that the Indigo Girls were going to give for free because he found out that they were homosexual and he had recieved angry phone calls from parents (turned out to be 30-40 calls out of a 3000 student school). He did the most cowardly thing there was to do and claimed that it was in the interest of community standards. As a teacher in a juvenile prison, I meet good cops and good administrators, but mostly I meet those that don't give a damn as long as they hang on to their power and their paychecks. I think if communities would stand together for something positive, such as opposing violence and supporting fairness, the results could be as dramatic as the negative ones we see every day.

Trying to pay attention, Chet W.