Letters

Another shooting tragedy. The sympathy for the Freeman students and their families is deep and widespread. It could have been much worse. This was an adolescent that had access to an assault rifle that fortunately jammed.

To all of the past students, all their parents, all their relatives, to all that were involved, to each of the injured and the family of the deceased and to all of the school district:

Ed Pace is at it again. When he disparaged time-saving, traffic-busting roundabouts, because "we are not Europe," I chuckled. I wonder if Ed has ever traveled to Europe? When he said government shouldn't be involved in child care, that child care should be left to churches, I cringed, remembering pastors, priests and orphanages of the past.

Spokane Valley City Councilman Ed Pace just put out a proposal that is against the law. He proposes to strip public health officials from making determinations about whether a child may be excluded from schools during a disease outbreak or epidemic. He wants to strip school officials from making decisions about curriculum and teaching methods. He wants to strip minors of confidentiality regarding health care and repeal protections for transgender people as adopted by the State Human Rights Commission.

Readers of Jane Mayer's "Dark Money" will easily identify the benign sounding Washington Policy Center (WPC), as our state's libertarian "think tank," one of the hundreds of tax-exempt 501(c)3 "educational" organizations spawned by the tax-deductible donations of the Koch brothers' network of billionaires to advance an anti-government, anti-science, anti-equality agenda.

In the recent cascade of national and local tragedies (Charlottesville, hurricanes, Freeman High School), refugees are easily forgotten. They are 21 million-plus unseen sufferers of long-term tragedy who rarely break into the news cycle. Their future hangs in the balance.

The Spokesman-Review recently published two articles featuring local library programs. The first report was on the Spokane Public Library's program "Books for Babies." This seemed to be a wonderful program that engages parents to read to their young children; it starts the little one on the road toward lifelong learning and the love of reading, and it was available throughout the city.

After reading the letter from Mr. Dufresne ("Light up indoors, Sept. 14), I feel compelled to respond. Please, please rethink this suggestion. With the outside air unbreathable, you are asking to be allowed to make the inside air in all public places equally unbreathable. For years and years, I wasn't able to dine in a restaurant, enjoy a movie in a theater, listen to music in any venue, because of the cigarette smoke allowed. Anyone who knows me will understand how hard it was for me to give up 'going out dancing'. I simply couldn't breathe.

Joe Dufresne (Sept. 14 letter) believes it would be nice if smokers were allowed to light up indoors so they wouldn't have to breathe the outdoor smoke from all the fires. He says a "little relief would be helpful" to smokers.

A yearning for innocence – that was the look in Sheriff Knezovich's eyes as we talked and stood together watching the Freeman student body re-enter their school. Through a thousand-strong prayer tunnel of community support and applause, the students walked together to reclaim their school, united as one.

After the disastrous storms in Texas and Florida, Donald Trump's EPA administrator Scott Pruitt cautioned this is "not the time" to talk about the unusual storms' causes. But he was corrected by Miami's Mayor Tomas Regalado, a Republican, who told the Miami Herald, "This is a truly, truly poster child for what is to come."

How many more innocent students and teachers need to die from gun shootings? Parents of these killers are still purchasing AR-15-type weapons and are sloppily locking them up for their children to figure out the combinations. I always thought these powerful rapid-fire guns were illegal. How much firing power do you need to kill a deer? Wouldn't you think that the handgun would have been enough to deter house invaders?

Back in the late 1980's, I was a second lieutenant in the Air Force. My maternal grandfather died shortly after I arrived to my home base. Of course, I thought I'd be granted leave to go to his funeral. Not as easy as it should have been. Had to get "special permission" and the reason given to me was "grandparents are not immediate family." Not kidding!

I read Tim Gardner's uninformed rant against our president ("Cancel my Republican," Sept. 9) and we are happy to lose him in the Republican Party. What is an affront is an American wanting our government to force all of us to think, act, and agree on what the government tells us to in a free country. This man has no concept of a free country, nor the context of what our president was addressing in Charlottesville.

Why is Cathy McMorris Rodgers smiling all the time? See must like stabbing her constituents in the back most every chance she gets, thinking we are not watching! Recently she voted to close local EPA offices, and they are the offices on the front lines to help protect the public's health and environment. She is voting to give the polluters a break and to destroy our bedrock protections that protect our water and air quality and allow the polluters to break the law. Tell her to get to work for us and not for the big polluters.

Our country is living in the echoes of the Civil War. I do not write that lightly.

Something as anonymous as a flier, cowardly distributed by night, leaves everyone in the dark as to what the activist's motives are. Some people wish to create the sense of a well-organized white-supremacist presence in our area. Let's caution ourselves to generalize and point fingers from any side, for any reason.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that city leaders were finally doing something to help small-business owners in the downtown core combat the effects of the transient population. I applauded the initiative to put down basalt rock under I-90 to make it uncomfortable for the transients to set up camp. The same initiative that was expedited through the council by Ben Stuckart.

Sprague Avenue, a major arterial was closed for months, millions spent, and to do what? To ease traffic? Nope, the polar opposite, to reduce four lanes to two, the so-called "road diet" that has become the mantra of our City Council.