Editor:

I concur with Mr. Thalman (2/14/97) that it is preposterous for my name to be included in a list with Plato, St. Augustine, and Immanuel Kant, as Michael Clover chose to do in his 2/6/97 letter. Although I personally found it humorous, I should have been astute enough to appreciate not everyone would view it that way. I therefore should have explicitly renounced and repudiated, in my 2/12/97 letter, such an absurd association between these eminent minds and a farm kid from West Texas.

On the other hand, just as the little boy in the Hans Christian Andersen story had no difficulty recognizing the emperor was buck naked and his "new clothes" were an illusion, today one does not need special brilliance or training to identify the utter bankruptcy of materialist philosophy and its horrendous consequences all around us.

The fact that Mr. Thalman seems to reject my plain critique of Kant indicates to me he may well be among those educators who see it their mission to indoctrinate the youth of our community in a set of beliefs that declare there is no truth, no right or wrong, no basis for human value, no purpose, no meaning, no soul, no God, not even a basis for government. It is no mystery, with this as the explicit agenda of the national teachers' unions, why so many youth are being sent to prison, why so many are resorting to drugs, why so many are committing suicide.

Teachers who are intent on teaching such a diabolical set of beliefs (and there are several such teachers in the Los Alamos schools), in my opinion, are committing felonies under existing New Mexico statutes. Why is there no public outcry over this travesty in our town? Why is the School Board paralyzed on getting involved? How does the school administration have the gall to ask for continued taxpayer support? If no one among us has the courage to act, we will all pay the price.

John Baumgardner