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Opinion
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- Written by: Bob Bridges
Yowee! Lakeport residents, have you looked at the city’s proposed water and sewer rate increases?
They total an eye-popping 100-percent increase over the next five years with no ending date.
It is based upon some out-of-town “expert” who doesn’t understand our cost of living, income or our lifestyles.
I look up and down the street at my place and half of the homes already have dead lawns. The city council needs to think of the side effects of this proposal and not just rubber stamp it without considering what it will do to the city.
The last “bright idea” the city approved, over a room full of protesting citizens, was the mandatory garbage that has rattled us out of bed, brought us torn up streets littered with garbage cans that lay there for days, and numerous rate hikes.
This proposal will burden us all at a time when there has been years with little or no increased in Social Security or paychecks. We already have three half empty shopping centers and numerous empty houses and shops.
This new “tax” will greatly burden all of us. If you have already let your lawn die, I guess now you are suppose to quit bathing and washing your clothes!
Tell the city council no! File a written protest by Sept. 18 and have them reconsider and scale this down so it doesn’t break us and turn the city brown.
Bob Bridges lives in Lakeport, Calif.
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- Written by: Teresa Welter
At 11: 15 a.m. on Labor Day, Monday, I was sitting at Redbud Park in Clearlake when a truck pulling a boat was pulling in and a police car with red lights flashing came in.
The boat was filled with three men and the truck with a couple of females. They were pulling in to launch the boat. Obviously they were getting pulled over for the men riding in the boat.
The police car had a female officer driving and a male officer in the passenger seat. They flashed the lights at the driver and hit the siren. The driver was pulling in slowly, clearly looking for a safe place to pull over where she would not be blocking anyone.
The officer hit the sirens again as she apparently was not stopping fast enough for their liking but was still clearly trying to pull over. She stopped right in her tracks not out of the way mind you.
The male officer jumped out of the car and yelled very loudly, “Stop the f***ing truck.” He then proceeded (more like stormed) to the passenger side of the truck where he yelled at the driver something similar if not exactly, “When you see a red light and a police car pulling you over, you stop your vehicle.”
At that point the female officer came up to the driver side window and spoke to the driver. She then yelled at the men to get out of the boat. They did so. The male officer stormed back to the squad car and they drove (more like sped) away.
My point is that it was completely out of line. The male police officer is supposed to be a role model. He was at a park with children and acted like a child himself.
Is this really the kind of police officer that we want “serving and protecting” us?
Teresa Welter lives in Hidden Valley Lake, Calif.
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- Written by: Nelson Strasser
Now that I am closing in on 69, I find that the problem of death is not so much death itself, which, according to a “round up of the latest world news,” is inevitable.
The problem is wasting too much of my remaining time thinking about death. Trying not to think about death, like trying not to think about anything, is difficult.
Shakespeare was not much help. In his famous soliloquy in Hamlet, “To be or not to be” he describes death as “the undiscover’d country, from whose bourne no traveler ever returned.” So much for the advanced scouting reports.
So, I have been thinking about finding some peace through religion. However, I am a bit of a skeptic.
I remembered my conversion from faith to skepticism: I was in Sunday school, at the age of 8, and the teacher told us the story about Abraham.
God ordered Abraham to kill his son in order to test his loyalty. Abraham was going to do it, but God stayed Abraham’s hand at the last second.
At that moment I thought about my own dad, and what he would have done. My dad had a mild acquaintance with mental illness, riding the roller coaster of mania and depression much of his life, but, he would never have acquiesced to stabbing me.
Then I got to thinking that maybe we have it wrong: God was really testing Abraham to see if he would blindly follow orders (going Nuremberg), or rebel in the name of love. And, what really happened at that fateful moment, is that Abraham failed the test.
This presents another problem: If God felt that love of family was of utmost importance, why would he sacrifice his own son and send him down here with a bunch of miscreants?
So, perhaps we have another piece of religion wrong as well: God did not make man in his own image, but precisely the opposite; man made God in his own image. No solace there.
Ernst Becker, in his classic book, “Denial of Death,” claimed that man cannot live without faith. I would argue that man can live without faith, but, frankly, it sucks.
Nelson Strasser lives in Lakeport, Calif.
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- Written by: Committee for a GE Free Lake County
We wish to express our gratitude to the Sierra Club Lake Group for their very generous donation to the “Yes on 37 Lake County” committee.
It is a tangible expression of their support and commitment to our right to know if we are eating genetically engineered food or not.
We will use these funds to educate our friends, neighbors, colleagues, church members and fellow residents of Lake County that in order to have the right to know if their food is genetically engineered they need to vote yes on Proposition 37.
Thank you again to the Sierra Club Lake Group for your support.
The Committee For a GE Free Lake County in Lake County, Calif., includes Haji Warf, Thurston Williams, Barbara Christwitz, Chloe Karl, John Thomas and Roberta Actor-Thomas.