Letters to the Editor
Mother Teresa Did Not Deserve Her Peace Prize, Either
The list of Nobel Peace Prize laureates includes some amazing forces for good, but as Justin Cannon correctly pointed out in an letter on Friday, some awards have been far more dubious. I am displeased to see Mother Teresa go without mention in Cannon’s summary of less-than-deserving winners. Her “work undertaken in the struggle to overcome poverty and distress” (to quote the Nobel committee’s justification for her award) is largely misunderstood. She did not help cure the poor. She did not help the sick of India. All she did was provide rudimentary beds for the dying.
She believed that, regardless of her victims’ religion, suffering would bring them closer to Jesus. There was so much wrong with the “care” she and her ilk provided that there is hardly room to go into detail here — reusing needles, withholding pain medication, etc. Her “hospitals” existed only to maximize suffering and convert people to Christianity. As the poor died in her arms, she would baptize them if they were not already Christians.
From where in this mess of suffering and proselytizing did even the notion of a nomination for the Peace Prize arise? Her clinics were not health care facilities. She operated in blatant violation of the Hippocratic Oath. Her death houses were simply centers of agony and last-minute forced conversions. Come to think of it, it’s no wonder that she has been beatified. Still, the Nobel Prize committee should know better than the Catholic Church, and it is unfortunate that the public eye still views her as a force for good.
Obama’s Carbon Footprint
How many tons of carbon did Air Force One and all of the other massive jets that were used to bring Obama and his entourage, limos and SUVs for the secret service and motorcades, pump into the atmosphere in order for him to give his speech about how we have to change our ways and how we are destroying the earth? What a hypocrite. Why didn’t he take the train?