To the editor:

On Jan. 20, 1997, the day President Clinton was inaugurated for a second term, North Korea was in the middle of a famine caused by floods in that country during 1995 and 1996. It is estimated that more than 5 million North Koreans were displaced by the floods and as many as 3.5 million died from starvation.

Despite the suffering in North Korea, there were no calls for President Clinton to cancel his inaugural celebrations, which, incidentally, cost more than the amount of assistance provided to North Korea as of February 1997. That month the U.S. State Department said aid to North Korea had, over the past two years, amounted to just “$18,425,000 in cash and in-kind support for emergency relief assistance — basically, medical supplies and food.”

I believe the recent letters to the editor demanding that President Bush cancel his inaugural celebration and instead send the money to tsunami victims have nothing to do with compassion. The motivation for these letters from Bush’s critics appears to have much more to do with their anger over Bush’s victory last November and their desire to deny Bush and his supporters the opportunity to celebrate that victory.

President Clinton didn’t mention the North Korean famine in his 1997 inaugural address, but he did offer a quote from Cardinal Bernardin, who had died shortly before Clinton’s inauguration: “It is wrong to waste the precious gift of time on acrimony and division.”

The Bush bashers should take Bernardin’s words to heart.

Kevin Groenhagen,

Lawrence