Readers Write: Can the military have a moral backbone?
Letters to the editor for the July 4, 2022 weekly magazine. One reader remembers listening to the Monitor on a counter top radio in the early 1950s.
The ethics of warfare
Thanks for the amazingly impactful May 30 cover story, “Molding a moral soldier,” that appears unique to the Monitor. I hate guns and I hate war, but as a friend once told me, “I’ll fight so you can believe what you want!”
This article shows that there can be a moral backbone to our military which would in turn reflect, one would think, in its physical effectiveness as well.
So long as we must live with this lesser evil of a military force, it is encouraging to know that there may be ways to lift it to a higher ground.
Charlotte Wallace
Durham, New Hampshire
The Monitor, 70 years later
Greetings from beautiful Western North Carolina! I’m reminiscing about a childhood experience back in my small hometown in northern Indiana. I was probably 11 or 12 years old, in the early 1950s. I was dialing our family counter top radio, just to explore, because like my dad, I liked music.
I came across a Monitor radio broadcast. This was something different! I was intrigued. There was news reporting going on, as I remember, but there was also a quality to the commentary that was different. I recall that even at my young age, I was drawn to the broadcast. It was not at all a religious message – it was secular reporting.
What was the attraction? Was it “my little secret” about something I had found that my parents had not yet discovered? To this day, I say that attraction was an “intangible” – a quality or qualities I cannot name.
Following a career in public health, I would reconnect with the Monitor 70 years later. About 25 years ago, I had followed the advice of almost every leader I read in the field of health at the time and put myself on a “media diet” as a stress reduction tool.
But after a time away from media, I yearned for a daily source of current and world events that I could resonate with. Enter, again, The Christian Science Monitor. Today the Monitor Daily and the Weekender newsletter arrive regularly in my email inbox.
It’s the window through which I read, listen to, and assimilate national and international news and events. Yes, it is journalism with a bias for hope, and that’s my personal preference and choice.
Jim Reed
Mills River, North Carolina