The
Letters to The
Editor
Examining
the SST Project
Transportation
Secretary John Volpe’s mindless eulogy of the Boeing SST project on June 5
reveals both his in-competence as a public official and the frightful momentum
of stupid policies. Even more appalling
than this was the recent approval by the House of Repre-sentatives of renewed
funds for the SST.
It is
inconceivable that the votes thereby gained for the Nixon admini-stration and
for the SST’s congressional supporters can possibly outweigh the economic and
ecological damage which would result from this absurd enterprise.
As a physician
and as an epidemio-logist, I am quite certain that the noise pollution effects
in the path of the SST will have serious adverse effects on all living
creatures with intact nervous sys-tems.
The meteorological and ecological effects which are predicted from cur-rently
available evidence spell disaster on a much broader scale.
As a
non-represented resident of Washington, D.C., I resent being heavily taxed to
finance a private bvusiness ven-ture of less than doubtful merit to build an
environment-destroying machine which will not only not be used in the U.S.
(hopefully) but will, in any case, be beyond the benefit or use of the average
citizen. This is even more tragic for
our fellow citizens with low or marginal in-comes, whose taxes also go for
nothing.
The President and
Mr. Volpe have given us the vague and specious excuse of national prestige as
the reason for building the SST. This
is a lot of hot air, to put it politely, even if what prestige we had were not
being des-troyed by our insane adventures in
No one stands to
profit from this ghastly project but Boeing Aircraft, the petroleum industry,
and somebody’s political campaign treasury.
Even though I am
not an economist, it is also easy to see that vast expen-ditures for
noninvestment toys like the SST are grave errors in the face of in-flation,
rising unemployment, and un-checked population growth. What we need, instead, are wise capital
invest-ments and careful mangement of our resources to provide for the
increasingly desperate social, health, and educational needs of our people.
Secretary Volpe
needs only to walk around the poorer districts of Washing-ton to see the numan
needs with which those SST funds are competing.
He needs only to spend several hours being asphyxiated in a traffic jam
to under-stand that it is getting less and less pos-sible to move in and out of
our cities or even from one side of town to another.
In view of these
many problems, there is not much to be said for getting to
WARREN M. HERN, M.D.