Your Space

We want to hear what you're saying. E-mail us at mail@urbanitebaltimore.com or send your letter to Mail,
Urbanite, P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211. Submissions should include your name, address, and daytime phone number; letters may be edited for length and clarity.


Thanks for the Memories
Your photographic spread on St. Stanislaus Church (October) did justice to the interior of this Fells Point icon. Anna Santana's professional photos captured perfectly the precious interior's details and she is to be commended for her work. Gutting the interior of this building for a school that has plenty of other options for expansion is unconscionable.

I also take issue with the photo caption that implied that "dwindling membership" closed the church in 2000. The parish at the time had between three hundred to four hundred members with no debts, a fat savings account, and a knack for fundraising. I believe the reason the Archdiocese of Baltimore closed the church was more a case of corporate consolidation—that is, more parishioners in fewer buildings. St. Stan's was doing fine and serving the community quite well. Instead of increasing membership in nearby parishes, overall enrollment is down because three hundred to four hundred people have not bothered to register anywhere else.

—Dan Kuc is an interior designer who lives in Fells Point.


Don't Trust Technology
In the August issue, Jenny Wierschem's review of the book Seven Fires really hit home for me. Not the part about the book, or about the fires—but her review's closing comments that suggested that our society could be putting too much faith in technology.  This concept has haunted us for decades, and I'm convinced that many recent events are giving ever-increasing evidence for her premise. 

Many people have suggested that "too much faith in technology" was the underlying theme of the movie Jurassic Park. Sure, we can create awesome technology, but being human, we always forget about some minor detail (like a T. Rex) that ends
up biting us in the rear.

Just think about what happened in our world, a few years before the 1993 release of Jurassic Park: In 1986, we had not had a nuclear reactor go into meltdown for several years. And some people got so complacent about it that one government let their inexperienced staff run a middle-of-the-night test where they cycled a reactor's coolers on and off until they blew the top off Chernobyl.

We see headlines about airline pilots, made complacent by millions of dollars worth of "idiot-proof" instruments, showing up to work drunk. Each of us, surrounded by our air bags and anti-lock braking systems, drive a several-ton piece of equipment at a mile-a-minute while engrossed in a distracting cell-phone conversation (or a BlackBerry e-mail check) that risks our lives, the lives of our passengers, and those of the motorists around us.
 
The good news is that we can embrace technology's limitations without becoming Luddites. We will always need to balance our reliance on technology with our humanity—and with a healthy dose of our innate skepticism. That's easier said than done, but I have seen rays of hope.

If a Seven Fires sequel is written, it won't include a chapter about me sitting through a fire alarm, assuming that the building's technology is giving a false positive, or about me having faith in technology that will control the fire. I will be putting my faith in the ability of my feet to move my ass out the door. 

—Jim Maguire is the president of WindCurrent, which provides clean renewable power to commercial, nonprofit, educational, and governmental organizations across the country.


Correction
There's a rule in journalism that says to double check the spelling of a person's name, even when it's Smith. That's especially important when it's spelled Y-o-u-n-g. We misprinted the name of Joseph Young, one of the founders of the blog Baltimore Interview (www.baltimoreinterview.blogspot.com) as Joseph Smith in our November "Have You Heard ..." department.