Letters to the Editor - The Lakeville Journal - 8-25-22

Climate issues are nonpartisan

Maureen Bateman wrote last week about our country’s need for more oil and gas to keep the economy going in the same old way, and our local 5th District’s need to maintain our habitual use of heating and cooling and transportation.  Indeed, we are creatures of habit, and once we’ve got our routines down, we are disinclined to change and can even feel mildly threatened. However, the real threat that we face is the huge uncertainty, discomfort, loss of life and livelihoods worldwide due to ecosystem collapse that we’ll all be experiencing from oil and gas-induced climate change. It’s too late to reverse course, so we must start making adjustments.

I was recently in Europe, and being curious about attitudes there towards the climate crisis in the face of Russian aggression, I engaged with scores of ordinary middle-class people (mostly German and Swiss) on the politics of energy and economy. They surprised me by expressing a real willingness and determination to make short-term sacrifices for long-term gain. They feel it is their civic duty that they must make changes now to maintain their communities. They support their federal and local energy conservation measures, are adjusting their thermostats, and are carpooling much more than before where public transport is not an option. In other words, they are organizing themselves at a local level to achieve energy savings.

My question to Maureen and others in my community is: how can we organize ourselves, our lives and our communities to conserve energy now and lobby for a faster transition to renewables (more employment, not less) and a circular economy?

We need to organize. Is it too much to ask that we think about how we can carpool?  What about using bikes and e-bikes more? Could we make use of the new federal incentives to make our next vehicle an electric one and replace our old oil heating with a heat pump? What about community solar? At the very least, Town Hall could reinstall the bike rack on the Main Street in Salisbury and install one near the Lakeville restaurants and coffee shop.

Our town could also take advantage of federal funds to subsidize the installation of EV stations for electric cars and trucks. We can all reduce, re-use, and recycle. These are nonpartisan issues. Future generations will care a whole lot less about how we voted and a whole lot more about what we did to save the planet for them.

Janet Graaff

Lakeville

 

Message of the movie still resonates

It does not take a great movie to remind us of the continuing importance of investigative journalism, but remind us it does, this movie about the unraveling of the Watergate debacle by two young reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of The Washington Post. Their work, supported by the editor and the publisher of The Post, resulted in President Richard Nixon’s decision to resign rather than face impeachment.

“All the President’s Men” was at The Moviehouse in Millerton as part of a movie tribute to great journalism during the 125th anniversary of The Lakeville Journal. It is a compelling adventure story of how an ill-conceived  break-in of Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate Hotel led finally to the desk of President Nixon. The buck stopped there, it turned out.

Woodward and Bernstein doggedly picked at one tiny corner of the break-in story and then followed the treads that eventually led to Nixon’s presidential demise. It’s a clear and thrilling dramatization of how good journalism uncovers facts, and in this case, helped to preserve our democracy.

We need such investigative journalism now more than ever as our country faces unprecedented attacks by you-know-whom on the constitutional and federal laws that sustain that democracy.

Kudos, too,  to the continuing presence of The Lakeville Journal and the important role it plays in keeping us aware of the important happenings in our own particular neighborhood.

Barbara Maltby

Lakeville

 

This candidate is worth your vote for 5th

Neighbors, we are in unprecedented times. Two million and counting illegals have crossed our southern border. Subsequently, fentanyl is flowing into our very neighborhoods and destroying our citizenry. Our U.S. attorney general refers to parents as “domestic terrorists” when they express concern about what is being taught and how it is being taught. The California ports show pictures of a tanker parking lot out into the Pacific.   

This issue was not laid at the feet of the incompetent transportation secretary. Did you know that independent truckers who were there and ready to transport where held up for days by the Union? When inappropriate locker room and bathroom accommodations exposed young girls to indecency, school boards shut the parents down and had them removed by the police.   

Rising costs in food, fuel, transportation, heating, etc. are not a temporary or transitory issue as Washington keeps telling us. What is our congressional leadership doing? The job of a congressional legislator or U.S. senator was never meant to be a job for life. We need a fresh look in our U.S. Capitol serving you and me.

This November, send George Logan, who represents a diversified Republican party.  Across America, the Republican Party continues to send women, minorities and candidates from non-traditional backgrounds to our Capitol to represent and serve us.

Running for the 5th District in Congress is George Logan. He is Afro-Latino and is fully bilingual in English and Spanish. His parents immigrated to the United States from Guatemala and settled in New Haven, where George was born and raised. Growing up in the City Point section of New Haven, George Logan utilized the help around him to beat the odds. He was able to attend high school, college and serve four years in the Connecticut state Senate as well as raising a family and working nearly 30 years as an engineer. He is an example of a mature American.

George Logan will bring to Washington, D.C., a commonsense-based platform addressing the  southern border crisis, supporting law enforcement agencies, working to reduce federal regulations on small businesses that were severally impacted by the pandemic, acknowledging the many avenues for energy without crippling the economy by favoring one source over another, stressing the need to keep the military technically advanced and more as he works across the aisle.

George Logan will bring back bipartisanship. He is not beholden to the Speaker of the House as is our current congressional Legislator.

George Logan is a dynamic hardworking man who will represent and serve us.   

This November, vote for George Logan as your 5th District congressional Representative.

Marie Barnum

Salisbury

 

Thank you for LJ 125th event

To the Lakeville Journal: sharing your celebration with local nonprofit organizations was a great idea.

As a member of the board of the 21st Century Fund for HVRHS, I especially appreciated having the opportunity to explain what our Fund does for the high school and to speak with students and parents who had received grants for their programs. I was also pleased to see other hardworking volunteers get a chance to show what their organizations do for our community. Being a new member of Rotary International, I am very glad they had a chance to talk with community members about the amazing ways in which Rotary contributes to life around the globe.

As a reader of The Lakeville Journal, I am grateful to have a source of news that lets me know what’s going on here in the Northwest Corner, and to hear what people think about politics, theater, books, food, the environment and especially the bears. Needless to say,  I am glad The Journal will be celebrating more anniversaries in the future.

Although next year is not a milestone year, I would urge The Lakeville Journal to sponsor this event again. I believe the nonprofits benefited greatly from the interaction with the community, and I  know that the visitors enjoyed the festivities as well.

Carol D. Schulz

Secretary, 21st Century Fund board of directors

Canaan

 

Public service: endangered species

“Maybe I should just go home and ride my tractor.”

­— Chuck Grassley

Charles Grassley won his Republican Iowa primary this summer at 89. Chuck, U.S. Senate President pro tempore 2019-2021, is a familiar face and voice for those of us tuned to national politics. Grassley was elected to the Iowa legislature in 1959, the U.S. House in 1974 and to the U.S. Senate in 1980 — at the rise of Ronald Reagan.

Grassley, as a Republican, voted along with his party 12 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). Yet in 2017, Grassley spoke counter to these repeal efforts: “You know, I could maybe give you 10 reasons why this bill shouldn’t be considered. But Republicans campaigned on this so often that you have a responsibility to carry out what you said in the campaign. That’s pretty much as much of a reason as the substance of the bill.”

A Reagan man, a prominent if not welcomed voice by folks like me, Grassley’s life is public service. Yet campaigning last week, Grassley invoked 2022 Republican rhetoric regarding the IRS: “Are they going to have a strike force that goes in with AK-15s already loaded, ready to shoot some small business person in Iowa with these, because I think they’re going after middle class and small business people ...”

Grassley as member of the Senate Committee for Taxation for decades (three times Chair of the Finance Committee) is the oversight for the IRS — yet knowingly he put a target on public service employees, for a Fox audience he puts AK-15s in the hands of IRS accountants. Rick Scott, senator from Florida, shoos young job seekers away from the IRS as it will be defunded if the GOP takes Congress in the midterm elections.

The highest echelon of Republican public servants spin false, dangerous accusations of employees in government agencies they once revered, gave their staunch support to — of professionals plying their medical, judicial, educational knowledge and commitment.    On Fox News, both Sen. Rand Paul and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich accused the FBI of “planting evidence” in their search at Mar-a-Lago. GOP-dominated state legislatures and 2022 GOP candidates have made election employment and volunteering a high risk to self and family. Loud, bawdy, vitriol 2022 Republican rhetoric is either propagated by or silently consented to by the party’s leadership.

GOP rhetoric no longer centers on governmental policies, differences in the role of government, a choice of big or little.  Today’s rhetoric is of conspiracies, the targeting of individuals, calls for retribution, insurrection.

JFK spoke of having courage to engage in public service never thinking public service was to be combat duty in a society weaponized with language and lethal arms. Public service remains esteemed by the American majority — defunding, diminishing, destroying its providers is a bad thing, imprudently ignorant. Let’s fix it. Overwhelm the ballot box with democracy: Vote.

“Stopping bad things is a significant public service.”

— Ted Cruz

Kathy Herald-Marlowe

Sharon

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