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Letters
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- Written by: Michelle Gonzalez
Walter Cronkite said, “Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.”
I am writing this letter to express my concerns about the recent decisions of officials who are supposed to be dedicated to the well-being of this community.
I am grateful to the head librarian for his foresight and plan to give the library at least a one-year reprieve, but I am concerned about the long-term.
“What a school (community) thinks about its library is a measure of what it feels about education,” said Harold Howe.
As a retired teacher, I can only think that the supervisors have not had the opportunity to visit our Lakeport or Clearlake library.
At almost any time of day there are patrons of all ages, browsing the shelves, doing research, working on the computers, checking out books, books on CDs and films.
The library also offers talks on a variety of subjects throughout the year, many of them are interactive and well-attended. Story time and activities for children are favorites of young mothers.
Ray Bradbury, a well-known science fiction author, said, “I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”
I would ask the Board of Supervisors members to make libraries in Lake County a top priority for the educational health of this and future generations.
Michelle Gonzalez lives in Kelseyville, Calif.
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- Written by: Roger Kinney
As a resident of the city of Clearlake, I have seen the horrific things that marijuana can do to people, neighborhoods and the community at large.
Violent home invasion robberies, where people were injured and others were killed!
During harvest season, there is a stench that fills the air.
People with asthma have difficulty breathing, and others don’t let their children go outside during the harvest season.
Beautiful houses are rented out, for one purpose only ... to become an illegal grow house.
Most of these “renters” are from out of the area. They don’t care what condition they leave the house or neighborhood in. It's not their concern.
A deadly cocktail of chemicals is used for growing and leaches into the groundwater table.
Water is diverted from creeks and used for illegal grows, and our natural landscape is destroyed.
Guard dogs bark relentlessly, and gunfire can be heard throughout the day and night.
I, for one, am tired of this!
If you feel the same way about our city of Clearlake, please sign our online petition for a “zero tolerance” city of Clearlake.
The petition can be found at https://www.change.org/p/clearlake-city-council-a-call-for-zero-tolerance-in-the-city-of-clearlake-ca?recruiter=60510860&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=share_email_responsive .
Roger Kinney lives in Clearlake, Calif.
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- Written by: Nelson Strasser
Sgt. Joseph Hickman has spent much of his working life in the military. He considers himself a patriot. Ronald Reagan is his favorite president. He did a year tour of duty at “Gitmo” (Guantanamo Bay, Cuba).
Not a man to shy away from violence, in the course of duty, he led a squad into a cell in Gitmo in response to a possible suicide, and ordered his men to fire at detainees within a distance where the rubber bullets could be lethal. The detainees nicknamed him “Satan.”
He is the last guy you would expect to expose a story of the “war lab” at Gitmo, where prisoners, under the auspices of a secret program, were drugged, beaten, tortured and murdered. However, Sgt. Hickman is also a man of conscious, and he signed an oath to defend the Constitution.
In his book, Sgt. Hickman describes the events surrounding the deaths of four alleged suicides, and the subsequent NCIS investigation.
His book is called “Murder at Camp Delta,” and I checked it out from the Lakeport Library.
Sgt. Hickman, with the help of the law school students at Seton Hall University and documents released due to the Freedom of Information Act, concluded that the investigation was flawed.
In fact, the investigators had not even interviewed the many witnesses involved who could have contradicted the findings of the investigation.
Sgt. Hickman is not a person given to conspiracy theories, but eventually, the facts led inexorably to a government program that went to the “dark side” and violated the Geneva Convention and the Constitution, and that was approved at the highest levels of government.
The illegal program was devised to collect data on how to most efficiently yield intelligence from prisoners, and is reminiscent of the experiments that the Nazis performed on human beings. Detainees were given a medicine which induces short term psychosis, for example.
Obama will not prosecute these crimes because he does not want to set a precedent under which he himself could be prosecuted. Obama knows the insurgents can’t be defeated, so he changed “defeat” to “degrade.” Degrade means that when the insurgency gains momentum, he will simply slaughter as many as he can with air attacks.
We have been in Afghanistan for close to 14 years. The opium output, despite intermittent attempts to eradicate the poppy fields, has doubled since 2000. Ninety percent of the world’s opium comes from Afghanistan. Not only have we left the drug trade to flourish, we have also left thousands of dead and hundreds of thousands of refugees.
I have to conclude, that anyone who does not do everything in their power, within the limits of the law, to stop our senseless slaughter of people in the mid-east, are the moral equivalent of the Germans who remained silent as the Nazis committed their nefarious deeds.
Nelson Strasser lives in Lakeport, Calif.
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- Written by: Bill Wink
Hey you! Yeah you! This is your fault!
While you are eating your Cheerios I want you to recognize what you have done. Surprised aren’t you?
What we are experiencing today, this unrest that is tearing at the fabric of society, has little to do with race and everything to do with bigger government.
More government control, more laws, more rules, more ordinances. And when you have more laws, more rules and more ordinances it is left up to law enforcement agencies to enforce those laws, rules and ordinances.
Before the seat belt law you never experienced an interaction with law enforcement over your seat belt. Before car seat legislation, no interaction, before talking on your cell phone was illegal, no interaction, before no smoking ordinances no interaction, before air quality control, no interaction and the list goes on and on and on.
So what happens when the incidence of interaction between law enforcement and we citizens increases exponentially?
The opportunity for something to go wrong increases at the same rate, and a man in Staten Island, New York loses his life because law enforcement was enforcing a city law regarding the sale of a single cigarette, that’s what happens.
Bigger government requires more money to operate. Government has only one source of revenue and that is you so somehow they must take from you what they need to feed bigger government, therefore, they send out the revenue collectors which we know as law enforcement agencies to enforce their revenue generating laws, rules and ordinances.
You reap what you sow.
Bill Wink lives in Hidden Valley Lake, Calif.