Letters to the editor

Requests to help homeless not intended as guilt
trip In his column “Celebrate, don’t hate
Thanksgiving,” (Nov. 24), Garin Hovannisian refers to the
homeless population as only “occasionally” less
fortunate than the rest of us. If you talk with some of the
homeless individuals in L.A., it’s not hard to see that
misfortune often plays a role; mental illness and negative life
circumstances just begin to explain the root of the problem. Next,
Garin took offense to his professor’s recent request for
homeless meal donations. Garin was not offended at the request
itself ““ he says that it was a worthy cause, and he donated a
few dollars for the L.A. Mission to feed the homeless with. Rather,
Garin didn’t like his professor’s reminder that few of
us have ever been homeless or felt unwanted ““ feeling this
was an unnecessary guilt trip and bristling at the implication of
an obligation. As a fellow classmate of Garin’s, however, my
opinion is that the professor was simply trying to voice an
otherwise obvious point explicitly. Only someone eager to express a
knee-jerk reaction would take offense to something as benign as the
professor’s comments. My guess is that the professor would
agree with me when I say that if his comments garnered 10 more
dollars ““ enough to feed five more people at L.A. Mission
““ it was worth possibly offending one conservative
columnist.

Take your petty little moral victory, Mr. Hovannisian. And thank
you for your two bucks.

Kartik Krishnan Fifth year, microbiology, immunology,
and molecular genetics

Student death deserves more recognition In
response to your article “Student dies in dorm room,”
(Nov. 22), I understand that such an article deserves mention on
the front page, especially since the student’s death occurred
in the dormitories. However, as a campus paper, I am indignant
about your failure to give the same equal regard for the death of
Steven Le, former Vietnamese Student Union chair. Steven worked
tirelessly as a student leader committed to many aspects of campus
life and deserves more than a mention on inside pages a week after
his death. This does not adhere to the same sympathies expressed by
Chancellor Carnesale in response to Amanda Hafleigh’s death
that “we deeply value each person in our UCLA family.”
I hope that in the future, another student tragedy won’t get
buried in the paper because someone in the editorial department
didn’t believe it was important enough.

Susan Huynh Third year, political science