WELCOME August 21, 2000 Issue

To Our Readers

Mary Metzner Trammell

Crowd violence is contagious, they say. It starts small and escalates the way it did that sultry summer afternoon in New York's Central Park, when some fifty women were molested by roving packs of men in a series of attacks after a parade. "It seems like what happened," a police supervisor said, "was the mob would do one bad thing, and then they would do something worse."

Of course, the US isn't the only place where hooligans (an Irish word for ruffians) sometimes take over. It happens in many countries and in many venues besides parades—at demonstrations, at football and soccer events, on college campuses, in areas where there's political unrest.

So can you and I do anything to control mob mentality takeovers? That's a question Staff Editor Rosalie Dunbar answers head-on in her Cover Story, "Let's end mob violence." Prayer, Rosalie points out, can arrest aggression effectively and peacefully. And, as Associate Editor Cyril Rakhmanoff says in "God and the Internet," prayer can be brought to bear on global communication takeovers, too, such as the recent "I love you" virus that infected computer systems worldwide.

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