Clear Thinking On Campbell Ave.

The Roanoke Times circulation department offers a "vacation stop", temporarily suspending your subscription while you are away from home. There's nothing unusual about that. I would imagine most newspapers offer such a service.

The purpose of this is obvious. If you decide not to take the Times circulation department up on their kind offer, some of those folks in your neighborhood that have been described as "least likely to succeed" will certainly notice the newspapers piling up on your porch. You can bet that their first reaction will not be, "Hmm, Mr. Foley must have decided he doesn't like the Roanoke Times anymore, I think I'll take those papers and read them myself". Nope, he will know that Mr. Foley has (1) not been home in a few days, (2) is not likely to be home for a few more days, (3) there's good stuff to be had in an unoccupied house. Fortunately, on those occasions when it's not possible or practical to use a vacation stop, we do have a competent police presence. They may not be able to prevent a break in, but their presence does at least cause second thoughts in a criminal brain

Now, the circulation department obviously has someone on their staff that has thought such situations through and decided that a vacation stop service would be a good thing to offer their customers.

Perhaps the editorial department should go downstairs and recruit a couple of clear thinkers from the circulation department. Today the editorial staff comes out in favor of telling the bad guys in Iraq to just wait and watch for the newspapers to start piling up in front of our barracks. It'll happen soon, bad guys, just wait.