Solutions from the Heart

Sir / Bravo to Psychiatrist Robert Coles [Feb. 14], who has discovered that the troubles of America can be identified by any social scientist but solutions will only come from the heart! Unfortunately the intellectual community remains aloof, intolerant and uncaring about the great majority of Americans. They would rather pick on people's weaknesses than embrace their strengths.

MARTIN C. MOONEY

Pemberton, N.J.

Sir / I wish all my well-educated, middleclass, narrow-minded friends would read what Robert Coles has observed. Bravo for his intellectual curiosity! I must admit that this article opened my eyes; I will no longer indulge myself in pity for the poor of America. Better to have the strength of "soul" than a 1972 Caddie.

JILL HALPERN

Venice, Calif.

Sir / Robert Coles rates a big, nonscientific F because of sheer ignorance of the facts of black life in the ghetto.

I lived for a year in Bedford-Stuyvesant (central Brooklyn), the worst ghetto in the U.S., and took part in building an integrated Community Development Center. We found the overwhelming majority of black people in Bed-Sty neither happy, courageous, nor even remotely "coping." Alcohol, drugs, prostitution, pervasive gambling, fatherless babies, teen-age dropouts, robbery and mugging are daily accelerating facts of life for the majority of whipped, defeated, unstable black victims of white institutionalized racism. Most blacks in the ghetto do suffer--not exotically, but horribly. Coles' misinterpretation denies the critical need for a radical reordering of the allocation of national resources.

GERALD M. SCHAFLANDER

Brielle, N.J.

Sir / Ironically, the "anti-stereotyping" that Psychiatrist Coles performs only reveals a neatly structured impasse. Except in the simplest cultures (to which technology bars our return), man is not physically capable of dealing with the number and complexity of decisions that result when each person must be dealt with as an individual. Stereotyping is the simplifier man has chosen to enable him to take action, but as Coles stresses, that simplifier misguides his action. It is Catch-22 that Coles has rediscovered.

ROBERT D. MORAN

Boston

The Slaughterhouse

Sir / Your writers were kind enough to call the Willowbrook State School for the mentally retarded a "human warehouse [Feb. 14]." I am inclined to be more realistic and classify it under the category of slaughterhouse. For what minds these children and adults do possess or once did possess have been totally destroyed by the complete lack of attention, respect, love and training that they so desperately need.

CHRISTINE CARROLL

Ithaca, N.Y.

Sir / It is not just the families of the retarded who are "unwilling or unable to care for them." It is the rest of society that refuses to have the normal flow of life disrupted by allowing equal rights for the handicapped--or their parents.

I may be the only person who has ever been asked to leave a Woolworth store because my autistic son started howling with fear when someone's dog came up to sniff him over. The dog was tolerated, but society is unable to accommodate this kind of misbehavior in public from a deviant human.

Mothers of teen-age baby sitters do not want their daughters to care for the handicapped, so the mother must give up any chance for a normal life and become a shut-in along with her child.

After years of helping the child achieve some useful status in society, you are then told that there are not enough funds to educate him.

The greatest grief for the parents comes when they finally are forced to bury their child alive in one of these repositories, because no one else cares.

(MRS.) NICOLE SIMON

Arlington, Mass.

Sir / For every state in the union there is a Willowbrook--a horror story that is always lived and remembered by each of us who has had to place a very loved one in the care of "our" states.

JACQUELYN CONNOR

Maiden, Mass.

Sir / As the mother of a retarded child who lives at home, I want to thank you for your article "Human Warehouse."

It is too bad that these retarded individuals can't revolt and let their conditions of living be known as the inmates in prisons do. Most convicts chose an unlawful way of life which led them to the prisons. But do retarded individuals have a choice to make in their lives?

KATHLEEN DODD

Menlo Park, Calif.

Sir / Those of us who have been working for years to wipe out the faults in some of our state schools for the retarded welcome the article about Willowbrook.

The so-called "battle of Willowbrook" began last March, when the commissioner of mental hygiene sent letters to every member of the state legislature in an attempt to offset the pressures being brought to bear by a widespread revolt of taxpayers. The tax rebels won that battle, and our budget was cut.

If the majority of the citizens of New York want to help us improve conditions at our state facilities for the mentally disabled, then they should make their views known to their legislators.

HAROLD WOLFE

Assistant Commissioner

for Communications State of New York

Department of Mental Hygiene Albany

Another Door

Sir / I read with some amusement your story "Speech Lessons" [Feb. 7], where you say that the President of Pakistan, Mr. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, has not given up "listening to the recorded speeches of Indonesia's late President Sukarno, which has had a notable influence" on his oratory. Your behind-the-door listener must have been listening behind someone else's door. President Bhutto's friendship with the late President Sukarno is well known, but it has never extended to either possessing or listening to his recorded speeches. Variations of public oratory are not unlimited, and most statesmen and public orators must have much in common.

M. RAFI RAZA

Special Assistant to the President

Rawalpindi, Pakistan

Direct Line

Sir / The International Olympic Committee's Avery Brundage [Feb. 14] must indeed be on a direct line to the Omnipotent! I wonder if when his time comes, he will be given more consideration than he and the I.O.C. gave Karl Schranz?

If he were to resign his post as president immediately, perhaps he would prevent further embarrassment for the U.S.

A.J. BRISKEY

Canandaigua, N.Y.

Sir /I can see it now: the scene is the 1984 Olympic Games. The favored downhill skier starts his run in a flurry of snow. Almost halfway down the course he skids to a stop in front of a TV camera, and for one minute he does a commercial praising the brand of skis he is wearing. After his spiel, he continues to the finish line, where the 60 seconds is subtracted from his run time. Any softening of the present Olympic codes will someday permit such a ridiculous happening. Longer live Avery Brundage!

ALVIN R. FLESHER

Baltimore

On Assignment

Sir / TIME'S article on Clifford Irving [Feb. 14] referred to my drifting in and out of the Ibiza circle. I was sent to Ibiza by my newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, on assignment: to read the manuscript, transcript and documents pertaining to the "Hughes autobiography," and to report on any other matters involved. I did so, and wrote my best judgment of the controversial book at that time. I had never been on Ibiza before.

My acquaintanceship with Clifford Irving began in Los Angeles ten years ago. When he left there, shortly after we met, I didn't see him again until June of last year, when at dinner he told me that he had been working on a book about American billionaires, including Paul Getty, H.L. Hunt and Howard Hughes, but that he had had no luck with the last. Thus I did not know of the existence of the "Hughes autobiography" until my assignment to Ibiza. Any inference of a mysterious connection between me and him, or between me and some Ibiza clique, is part of the many fictions in this affair, but, in fact, is untrue.

ROBERT KIRSCH

Caux, Switzerland

Free Enterprise

Sir / I was shocked to see Donald M. Morrison's "The Future of Free Enterprise" [Feb. 14] attempt to use the same old cliches concerning big business, concentration, competition and antitrust actions, and I was shocked further to see him conclude that free enterprise was more endangered by large enterprise than by Government wage-price controls. On analysis, "economic power" turns out to be the result of either economies that firms have innovated or simple consumer preference for one brand over another. And antitrust, which Mr. Morrison would apply vigorously to "expand free enterprise"(!), has a bloody history of doing precisely the opposite.

Free enterprise will begin to have a future when Government begins to withdraw from the marketplace.

D.T. ARMENTANO, PH.D.

Associate Professor of Economics

University of Hartford

West Hartford, Conn.

Sir / You're beating a dead horse. We the people have already figured it out. If free enterprise doesn't work, we get unemployment and depression. If it does work, we get pollution and plunder and overproduction. Any idiot could invent a better system to distribute wealth.

J.R. OSBURN

Silver Spring, Md.

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