Letters

Your article on Landmark Education and the information about Cult Awareness Network and Action Works was most appreciated and well-presented. I am a recent "graduate" of The Forum and The Forum in Action series. My background is in the field of education, and I wanted to find out just what the Landmark Education program encompassed, what its methodologies were, and the reasons for the praise and success stories I had heard.

After participating in the intense three-day Forum workshop, I was convinced that this was not a group I wanted to remain connected with; however, I had invested $290 for The Forum, and a follow-up series of ten sessions was included in that price. I was curious to see if the follow-up would change my mind about Landmark Education, so I committed to attending the ten sessions regardless of how I felt while attending any individual session. At the end of the ten, I reaffirmed that Landmark Education was not the way for me to achieve a "life I love."

I plan to review the concepts from Landmark Forum and use them constructively to make a difference in my own life and in my relationships with family, co-workers and community. I congratulate those who participated and awakened to concepts and behaviors that will indeed make them happy and successful in life; I feel sorry for them that it will cost them so much in both emotional and financial investment. For those who became angry or disappointed as a result of their participation, I can only stand by ready to talk with them and give them encouragement and support to pursue the lifestyle for them that is not wrong. Psychologically, it is better to be intact and in pursuit of options and alternatives than to be fragmented and not know how or where to turn for help.

Name withheld on request

Editor's note: A clarification to Steve Jackson's April 18 "It Happens." In 1984, Werner Erhard changed the name of Erhard Seminars Training (or est) to Werner Erhard & Associates; Erhard then dubbed the company's principal seminar The Forum. In 1991 Erhard sold his company, now named Transnational Education Corporation, to his employees. The new owners changed the name to Landmark Education Corporation but kept The Forum.

Nothing Personal
Regarding Steve Jackson's "I Think I Can, I Think I Can," in the April 18 issue:

Just a note to let you know I will be praying that you receive your just desserts. "Besmirched," "beslimed," "besmeared" and "duped" are the words that sum up how I feel after reading your article on personal rapid transit as a possibility for the Denver metropolitan area. "Duplicitous" comes to mind as I recall my conversations with you.

The absence of any mention of Raytheon's Rosemount project, in which the Illinois Regional Transportation Authority has invested much time and money, or the Morgantown PRT system (in operation for the better part of fifteen years) reminds me why I do not read your paper in the first place. What a naive individual I am to think that you are anything but what you are.

Please be advised that I will use the public forums within my influence to denounce your paper. May the information you missed about what I have been and am involved in in this community be your undoing. That you could be so self-serving without a concern (in my view) for what your actions could impact is irresponsibility to the nth degree.

Frederick M. Hopkins
Denver

Past Imperfect
As a baseball fan ever since I saw Stan Musial hit one out of old Busch Stadium, formerly Sportsman's Park, at the age of seven, I was enthralled with Bill Gallo's April 18 column, "True Colors."

At first I thought my reason for enjoying this observance of the fiftieth anniversary of Branch Rickey's signing of Jackie Robinson was its focus on Robinson's first year as a Brooklyn Dodger, 1946, which he spent with the Dodgers' AAA minor team, the Montreal Royals. After all, even the most casual baseball fan has read and heard the story of the second year, 1947, when Robinson actually came up to the big leagues and broke the major-league "whites only" rule that had been in effect since the 1880s.

Upon further thought, however, I realized that I simply had been swept away by a compellingly written account of a lost time. It was a time a few years before I was born. It was not a perfect time. Racial segregation was still upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, and many ballparks, especially Sportsman's Park, still had "white" and "colored" sections. It would be more than a dozen years before every major-league team broke down and began signing African-American and Latino players.

Nevertheless, to this 41-year-old, the late Forties way of establishing oneself as belonging--at the plate, in the field and on the basepaths--seems a more straightforward and nobler approach than that all too frequently taken by Robinson's 1990s counterparts, of all ethnic backgrounds, of whining, litigating and holding out. As today's game bounces back and forth between shameless schmaltz and self-absorbed greed, Bill Gallo's column holds out hope, through knowledge of the past, for the future.