Editorials

<< Previous   of   Next >>   ADVERTISEMENT   HAVE YOUR SAY Feel strongly about something? Share it with the community by writing a letter to the editor. You’ll need to include your name, address and daytime phone number. (We’ll only publish your name and hometown.) We reserve the right to edit letters, but if you keep yours to 300 words or less, we won’t ask you to shorten it. If your letter is published, please wait 30 days before submitting another. Send it to: E-mail: letters@heraldnet.com Mail: Letters section The Herald P.O. Box 930 Everett, WA 98206 Fax: 425-339-3458 Have a question about letters? Contact Carol MacPherson (cmacpherson@heraldnet.com or 425-339-3472).   Published: Friday, May 16, 2008 End may not be near, but you have to wonder Periodically, it's important to take stock and remember all that is right and good with the world. Other times, it's necessary to note the signs that things just aren't right. That we're going to hell in a handbasket, as someone's grandma used to say. That the apocalypse is nigh. For example, the locusts have arrived. Except they are in the form of ants. The Associated Press reports that "crazy raspberry ants" are overtaking the Houston area. The hairy, reddish, flea-sized insects bite people, but the main menace is that the ants have a penchant for electrical equipment. They have ruined pumps at sewage pumping stations, fouled computers and one homeowner's gas meter, and caused fire alarms to malfunction. The crazy ants do eat fire ants, another introduced scourge in Texas, but they suck the sweet juices from plants, feed on beneficial insects and eat the hatchlings of an endangered grouse. The crazy ants, now emerging by the billions in five Texas counties with the onset of the warm, humid season, are so far resistant to over-the-counter ant killers. Ants that kill crops and computers? The work of the devil or terrorists? Those crazy ants, officially "paratrenicha species near pubens," are just itching to take over the United States, our electronic equipment and life as we know it. Perhaps Texas needs to be quarantined. A step forward for society at large or another point toward the end times? You make the call. Shamelessness has always been with us. But perhaps we've reached a tipping point, a time when all-out, bald-faced badness outweighs goodness. We don't believe it. But the morally out-of-balanced do cast a huge shadow, far out of proportion to their little lives. For example, the swell lady accused of faking brain cancer so she could get out of doing her work with the Department of Social and Health Services, but also get money and sympathy. The employee, with a whopping five months at the job, told her employer she had cancer, and backed this up with fake letters from doctors. Her co-workers generously donated time and money. No one wants to be a cynic, but someone has to be. Here's an excerpt from a letter supposedly signed by an oncologist at the University of Washington Medical Center: "When Sandra chooses, she can work and the days she can't she needs to stay home." That's a note someone fantasizing about getting out of work would write. If that's the kind of evil genius taking of advantage of us, perhaps the end is sooner than we know.

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