Insult

I found your editorial ''The Delaware Bottleneck'' (August 28) both offensive as a native Delawarean and hypocritical as a current Marylander.If two-way vs. one-way tolls is that pressing an issue, then why not discuss the real ''Maryland Bottlenecks,'' namely the Fort McHenry and Harbor tunnels. These areas are far more aggravating bottlenecks than the toll at the Delaware-Maryland state line, where I have yet to experience more than a three- or four-minute wait, except during of University of Delaware homecomings.

Those ''heroes'' and ''heroines'' of the '60s never saw a cause worth fighting for or a war worth winning. They have now delivered the final insult.As the anniversary of the end of World War II approaches, they are reaching back a generation and demeaning their parents' sacrifice, patriotism and decisiveness, saying there was no need and no excuse for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.Even the Washington Post was offended by a purely propagandistic program narrated by Peter Jennings on ABC. Reviewer Ken Ringle called it ''an ingenue's stroll down the narrow tunnels of academic revisionism with only occasional intimations that larger truths may lie outside.

Folks who have to pinch local government pennies down in the states along the Gulf of Mexico can barely control their glee at the windfall Congress provided them shortly before adjourning last weekend. Lawmakers voted to lift a ban on far-offshore oil and gas drilling in the gulf, and to share royalties on the leases with Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Texas. The states should take care to ensure, though, that those royalties actually get collected. It seems the federal agency in charge of monitoring the leases is so lax there are no guarantees.

President Clinton has thrown all the clout at his command behind his nominee for surgeon general, Dr. Joycelyn Elders. His most pressing reason has nothing to do with Dr. Elders -- a personal friend -- or her fitness for the job. Mr. Clinton simply cannot abandon another black nominee after the Lani Guinier fiasco.But unlike Ms. Guinier, whose radical political solutions to racial problems had to be ferreted out of recondite law reviews, Dr. Elders broadcasts her hair-raising ideas. She has declared: ''The surgeon general really does have a bully pulpit, you know, and I'll use it.''Moreover, Dr. Elders' record as head of the Department of Health in Arkansas is a resounding flop.

The infantile food fight taking place in Congress in recent days over which partisan, nonbinding Iraq resolution would get a vote is nothing short of a national embarrassment. Worse, it is a slap in the face to the troops in harm's way who are desperately looking for adult leadership from those who helped send them there. Be it the House, the Senate or the White House, all too often, the arguments now being framed with regard to Iraq are being offered based on lowest-common-denominator, partisan self-interest.

IT SEEMS like every time I am tending to my flowers outside my South Baltimore rowhouse the same man comes down the street. "You're sure lucky you still have these flowers," he always says. "Damn kids tear up everything. It ain't worth it." I nod but choose not to heed his warning. He's just a naysayer, I tell myself. My hose, garden gloves and determination have shaped up this gray, litter-strewn block. Two years ago, a neighbor and I put flower boxes around trees on the sidewalk which we fill every season with colorful plants.

HOWARD COUNTY CENTERFOR THE ARTS8510 High Ridge Road, Ellicott City. "SavedFragments -- Vain Refuge"Rusted bare iron trees, and earth-tone tile floor grids representing maps of Baltimore and Washington D.C., along withdrawings of geese and ducks fill Gallery I of the Howard County Center for the Arts in this season's opening exhibit, featuring a specially commissioned installation by Pennsylvania artist Duane McDiarmid. His thesis involves the environment and what few vestiges of nature remain after the encroachment by mankind.

Even the youngest kids are politically correct nowadays.Take, for instance, Columbia's Longfellow Elementary School students, who last week voted to change the school's mascot from an Indian to an eagle."

In his op-ed ( "Cooling out poor, minority kids in community college," May 9), Fred Millar has insulted the success by every student of any color who has attended and graduated from a community college. Despite being an "educational sociologist," Mr. Millar also perpetuates the myth that grades should not matter for eligibility to either 2- or 4-year colleges. While discussing the quality of remedial courses for those in both institutions, Mr. Millar never mentions why remedial courses are necessary in the first place.

The editorial "Howard's school choice" in the September 29th edition was disturbing, if not downright offensive. In it, The Sun implies that since there are no African-American or Hispanic members on the school board, the voters of Howard must be racists, and action is needed to negate their voting choices. It is also implied that the board only acts in the interest of the western county schools, when in fact the school board acts in the interest of all county schools. In the current mindset of "diversity is job one" that your paper seems to embrace, you apparently see nothing wrong with taking away Howard residents' choices for their school board and replacing them with a board where some members are appointed to ensure the racial and ethnic makeup is "correct.