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You have had to hear the phrase “a necessary evil.” That’s exactly what taxes are. No one likes paying taxes, but do you want paved roads and bridges built over Iowa rivers? Do you want law enforcement and schools and if you’re flying, you want that air traffic controller paid, right?
Do you get Social Security and Medicare? Those are just mandatory savings plans because people just don’t put money away for old age. One greedy party tries to make entitlement a bad word. According to Webster’s Dictionary, it’s “a right to benefits specified by law.” You pay in, you get back.
Rich people are so greedy they don’t want their money going for the common good. They might want three yachts instead of one. They don’t want to pay “a necessary evil” so when voters put Republicans in, all they did was crap in their own nest.
Dave Haynes, Duncombe
While pandemics have receded from public discourse, their potential threat very much remains. Animal agriculture in general, and factory farming in particular, drastically increases the risk of zoonotic viruses making the jump to humans. Politicians interested in advancing public health should support government funding for cultivated-meat research. For those who don’t know, cultivated meat is grown from livestock cells, without raising and slaughtering animals.
The new protein is identical to slaughtered meat at a cellular level, however the need for sick livestock to come in contact with human workers is eliminated. Widespread adoption of cultivated meat would significantly reduce the threat of pandemics. While there are technological hurdles to mass production, these can be overcome with public investment in cellular-agriculture development. Government leaders should back this effort to create a safer, healthier world.
Jon Hochschartner, Granby, Conn.
$17.9 billion has gone to Israel since the start of the conflict in Gaza. $350 billion since Israel’s founding, making the god of Israel absolutely the largest foreign recipient of American tax dollars.
The followers of Jesus tend to be good tax paying citizens. Unfortunately, too many assent to the status quo without thinking about it. Besides, there’s no apportioned representation in Congress in proportion to population growth. If there was, would YOU consent to the destruction of Palestine?
To put people power in Congress, the law that limited the number of representatives (PL 62-5) must be repealed. Then state legislatures will have to serve as individual chambers in a 50 chamber House, with one representative for every 30,000, instead of one for every 900,000+.
Jon Meadow, Eugene, Ore.
From your own personal viewpoint, was it disrespectful OR acts of courage when Colin Kaepernick and several other National Football League players “took a knee” several years ago, while the United States National Anthem was sung? If we are fully in command of our nation’s entire history, it is definitely the latter. But, why? Because their silent and powerfully visible act drew much needed attention to the hypocrisy embedded within said anthem, namely “… O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
What hypocrisy? In 1814, when Francis Scott Key penned the stirring lyrics of The Star-Spangled Banner, slavery had been operating in America for some 200 years (1619 Project). In realty, as a slave-owner himself, Key knew” the land of the free” was inhabited by hundreds of thousands of slaves and Irish, Scottish, and European indentured servants, who were certainly not “free.” The hypocrisy, therefore, was the juxtaposition between his words and the sad and verifiable truth.
Since Key’s hypocrisy, progress has been made in the United States (namely, Emancipation Proclamation, 13th and 14th Amendments, etc.) toward achieving equal rights and protections under the laws, but the journey to “bravely" advocate for the eradication of systemic racism, and to provide all Americans with equality without exceptions, is still sadly ongoing. Until we ALL are truly free, including those individuals seeking/applying for citizenship, the last line of our national anthem should read: “O’er the land of the nearly, almost, supposedly free and the home of the yet to be brave.”
John M. Mishler, Harpswell, Maine
From the least to the greatest in America we don’t care about what is happening in Gaza. That is abundantly clear.
The Israeli military continues daily to gun-down or bomb desperately hungry civilians based on the threadbare excuse there are bad guys lurking about among the hungry. There are plenty of bad guys lurking about among the fat and happy in the Israeli Knesset, but I don’t see anybody gunning them down.
This is callous savagery masquerading as salvific heroism on the part of far-right militants in Israel.
Israel in the throes of such anti-humanitarian propaganda has become an embarrassment to all the world. It is doing its best to extinguish the meritorious history it claims in the Hebrew Bible detailing its civilization before going into captivity at the hands of ancient Babylonia.
I have never been more disgusted with American political leaders, left and right, in my entire life. I am ashamed of docile Americans who read the daily stats and see the daily visual reporting with little to no citizen action on their part.
America has lost its soul.
Kimball Shinkoskey, Woods Cross, Utah
The Democrats fought honorably to prevent the horror show that's playing out before our eyes. The Democrats lost. They lost bad. It was brutal and it was ugly.
Losing hurts. But better to lose with honor than win by lying and appealing to ignorance and bigotry.
The moral principle here has been valid for at least two millennia. In the Bible, Jesus asked how it profits a man to gain the whole world if it costs him his soul. He said it twice. He meant it.
Now, Trump and his Republican toadies are up to their eyeballs in corruption, cruelty and chaos. They’ve seized the levers of power and set in motion this toxic, flaming, runaway freight train to Hell.
And they have no one left to blame except each other.
Dave Coyne, Goshen, Ind.
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