Letters To The Editor

HEALTH CARE

Mental health can’t afford cutback

Re: “Ax falls on mental health” (June 29).

Don’t think for a minute that this loss will not effect us all. When my family member needed someone to talk to, he went to Spokane Mental Health and they were there for for him, probably saving his life from a once-in-a-lifetime depressive episode. When I, later on, needed someone to talk to, they were there for me.

Anyone can benefit from mental health professional care. It’s not someone else’s loss we are talking about here.

Pay attention, now. If you take 90 jobs from professionals in the Spokane area, it will leave mental health professionals stretched so thinly that people will fall through the cracks.

Here in Seattle, we have had three situations where whole families were murdered due to untreated mental illnesses. This can happen in Spokane if you do not keep enough mental health workers available to handle the work load. This is not an area where you can afford to cut back! Kathryn Henne Seattle

Hope for more, better treatment

Significant changes in mental health treatment in our county are occurring this week. A new system takes effect July 1.

These changes were instigated, county officials and employees often said, in order to provide treatment choices for consumers. I certainly hope the end result will be more and better treatment for residents of Spokane County. We will see what happens.

I ask Spokane’s media to watch and report back to our community what shakes out of all this, both in the immediate future and over the next year. Rex Rempel Spokane

Doctor’s union a good decision

It was interesting to read the negative reaction to doctors forming a union to protect their interests from abuses in the managed care industry. I’m 53 and recall when doctors were the guys with new Buicks, made a decent living and were regarded as neighborhood sages. The image of Doc from “Gunsmoke” or Marcus Welby comes to mind - people who not only set broken bones, but were there for advice on broken hearts. The doctor-patient relationship was sacred, substantial and personal.

I don’t believe anyone begrudged a doctor a good income. The advent of managed care has inserted an unnecessary layer between doctor and patient. It appears that business discovered an area where they could inject themselves and take the profit. In truth, they’re a superfluous factor in the doctor-patient relationship. Both doctors and patients have suffered as a result of their search for profits. The doctors’ union is the other side to the “patients’ bill of rights” now languishing in the House. Twenty years ago, these issues would have seemed ridiculous, and now both are essential. The obvious big change is the introduction of managed care bean counters into the medical profession.

I, for one, applaud the doctors’ decision to form a union, and urge Congress to pass the patients bill of rights. Together, these ingredients might restore the confidence we used to have in our doctors and health care in general.

Most of us would prefer to have a doctor make medical decisions instead of a business decision based on return. Eric P. Slind Colbert

HEALTH AND SAFETY

`Still the same old snow job’

One winter in the mid-‘50s, after an atom bomb test in the Nevada desert, the winds shifted and radioactive snow fell in Spokane. First, the authorities warned us not to eat the snow. Then they told us that the snow wasn’t really dangerous. Finally, they reassured us that a little radiation was good for us. (Yes, folks, it really happened.)

Now we learn that strontium-90 - the same deadly isotope of the Spokane snowfall - is leaking into the Columbia River near the spawning grounds of fall chinook salmon. Once again, we’re told that there’s “probably” no danger. What next, that a little Strontium-90 is good for the salmon?

Forty years have elapsed and it’s still the same old snow job.

During the Manhattan Project and the ensuing Cold War arms race, when Hanford produced plutonium for our nuclear weapons, national security demanded that the activities there be kept hush-hush. Now, though, what justifies the continued lies and cover-ups? Are we perhaps concerned that the Chinese will steal our secrets and use them to contaminate their own nuclear sites?

And then there are those pesky radioactive mulberry bushes which keep springing up. Cut them down near the N-reactor and the next year, they pop up downstream of the H-reactor.

Like the murderous Lady MacBeth, yelling, “Out, damned spot!” Hanford crews just can’t eradicate the evidence of their nuclear crimes.

I can hear tomorrow’s children singing, “Here we glow ‘round the mulberry bush…” George D. “Martin” Maloney Spokane

LAW AND JUSTICE

Flag burning is a hate crime

Why is it against the law to burn a cross but not against the law to burn the American flag? Some would say that burning a cross is a hate crime that disrespects some people. I think that burning the American flag disrespects a whole nation. Why else would anyone burn the flag, unless they hate the country?

Do you know what I hate? Hypocrisy! Kathy C. Hood Sandpoint

Off the mark on court’s decision

The Spokesman-Review has missed the point of recent Supreme Court decisions. Your editorials portray dissenting opinions in Sutton vs. United Airlines to say a person who is nearsighted should fly an airplane. You should try reading the case and the opinions before making such false assertions.

The opinion had nothing to do with whether or not someone should fly a plane. The opinion in these cases said if a person has a disability that can be even temporarily corrected by any means, they are not disabled.

Justice Stevens said: The fact that a prosthetic device, such as an artificial leg, has restored one’s ability to perform major life activities surely cannot mean that subsection (A) of the definition is inapplicable.

That’s what the Supreme Court ruled, however. How far should we take this argument? Does it mean a person using a wheelchair is no longer disabled because they have overcome the major limitation of mobility? A person with epilepsy is not be considered disabled because medication may control some seizures under some circumstances? A person who is deaf is not disabled because sign language allows them to communicate?

And, what about discrimination the law was intended to outlaw? Under this ruling, employers can fire a person for no other reason than a disability, counties like Spokane can eliminate paratransit services, cities like Sandusky, Ohio, can continue running people out of their town just because they use a wheelchair.

We are back where we were 10 years ago. Martin J. Taylor Post Falls

EXTENT OF THE LAW

Precautions take away freedoms

The editorial of June 26 notes that “thought through,” the smoking ban in outdoor areas is too impractical.

The painful thing for me as an older American is the fact that such government intrusion into the lives of Americans could even be considered - even if it were practical!

Young Americans meekly accept such intrusive government control, thinking, Well, shoot, it’s for my own good.

I am an old guy, now 59, and I remember the days of high slides and merry-go-rounds in parks. I remember the days of community pools with high dives. I remember drinking fresh apple cider at Octoberfests and having, and being able to, flavor an Orange Julius with a fresh egg. I remember the days when you could build a home with separate controls for hot and cold water in a shower. All these things are now illegal, as the government protects us from ourselves.

Luckily, I guess we in Bonner County have America’s last crack at freedom, as we did away with our building department and we can build beautiful decks as they do in Austria and all over Europe, with planters and benches around the periphery. Only in Bonner County can we legally build decks where snow can still be shoved off the deck in the winter without being hindered by a bottom rail four inches from the deck floor. And only in Bonner County can we sit on our deck without our view being obstructed by the top rail. I remember days the of my childhood when decks were beautiful without mandated railings 4-6 inches apart, when one could drive across a bridge and look into the rivers and sloughs, and when all of America really was the land of the free.

Once Americans gave the government the ability to ensure their safety completely, they gave the government the ability to control them absolutely. Foster W. Cline Sandpoint

FIREARMS

House should reorganize priorities

I am scandalized at the current House of Representatives, its leadership and its priorities. The House has ignored overwhelming public support for sensible gun control.

There is no reason for anyone to buy a deadly weapon from any source without a thorough background check. Waiting three days traumatizes no one.

Is the majority of the public fairly represented in the House? No. The House has ignored its own campaign rhetoric to save Social Security. Instead of solving agreed-upon problems they have pointed fingers, avoided difficult decisions and assigned blame. Is this need being addressed in a timely fashion by our representatives? No. If the House spent the same energy on medical insurance problems, for example, as it did on impeachment, what might it accomplish?

That would be responsive representation. Do we have it? No.

I single out the House instead of the whole Congress because the Senate is marginally less bad.

Ah, but the House has finally done something. They voted to ban desecration of the flag. Will this make our kids safer? Our seniors more secure? Our uninsured better cared for? Our underclass more self-sufficient? No.

Will someone please tell the House of Nonrepresentatives the ‘60s are over? Hoards of revolutionaries are not at the gates. Most of us have moved on. We care about a lot of things which Congress clearly prefers to skirt.

I am reminded of Jesus’ description of some leaders in his day as “blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel.” Larry D. Winters Cheney

Piling on wrongs makes no right

Freedom is like a plant. If you don’t water it from the water can of patriotism, the hot sun of tyranny will kill it!

Every day we hear stories about kids committing violent acts with guns in schools. But what we rarely hear is how the children, or teenagers, got the guns they used in the first place.

With the recent rash of school shootings, anti-gun groups are trying to use these tragedies for their own cynical political benefit. This type of self-serving action was most recently seen in Congress with the attempt to pass new gun control legislation. Apparently, many government officials, media mouthpieces and various anti-gun special-interest groups haven’t gotten the message that gun control laws only affect those who obey the law in the first place. Which means criminals will not be affected in any measurable way, since they do not get their guns, for the most part, from licensed gun dealers.

So why continue to support more gun control laws? Perhaps they believe that if one law doesn’t work they should pass another law to correct what the first law did not. And if the second law does not work, then pass yet another law to correct what the first two laws did not correct. And so on! Ernest J. Chamberlain Spokane

Idaho Constitution allows militia

In reference to John D. McCallum’s June 24 letter, I will refer to paragraph one, Section XIV of the Idaho Constitution:

Persons subject to military duty. All able-bodied male persons, residents of this state, between the ages of 18 and 45 years, shall be enrolled in the militia and perform such military duty as may be required by law; but no person having conscientious scruples against bearing arms, shall be compelled to perform such duties in time of peace. Every person claiming such exemption from service, shall, in lieu thereof, pay into the school fund of the county of which he may be a resident, an equivalent in money, the amount and manner of payment to be fixed by law. Carl Thomas Zmuda Priest River, Idaho

OTHER TOPICS

Truth not set about homosexuality

Re: Mary L.E. McDowell’s letter of June 27, “Homosexuality is a disorder.”

McDowell’s arguments are flawed. She states that psychiatrists’ opinions on homosexuality make her opinion a verifiable fact. Where is the fact proven?

Facts are objective things. Opinions are subjective. The truth regarding homosexuality is far from being categorically a disorder. Indeed, the preponderance of research indicates that is a matter of natural biological processes, not “disorder” or “deviation.”

Perhaps McDowell should seek a position in the Catholic Church. It has a 500-year history of denying the truth of a heliocentric universe and holding to their egocentric opinion in the guise of “stated fact.”

Yes, McDowell, please be patient, loving and informed. But get your information from factual sources, not opinions that support your own. And remember, everything is subject to change, especially what we know about the truth. Use your own mind and think for yourself. Don’t be a blind follower of opinion. Remember what Magellan said, “The church says the world is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen it’s shadow on the moon and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church.” Chris H. Miller Spokane

American aid in Kosovo shameful

I am incensed that America risked the lives of our soldiers and spent billions of dollars to defend the Kosovars - who execute, imprison, denigrate and drive their wives and daughters to suicide for falling victim to enemy rapers.

I wonder how noble any American or NATO soldier can feel, that they risked leaving their children fatherless and their wives widows to defend a nation that exiles and denigrates their innocent daughters and wives who fall prey to the enemy.

This is the most shameless time in the history of America. For all the history that our brilliant experts studied, did our intelligence not know that this was the custom of the Kosovars? How virtuous will the NATO peacekeepers feel that they risk their lives, (inevitably some will step on land mines), to die for a people with so little regard for their defenseless loved ones?

I do not want one penny of my taxes contributed to rebuilding this nation. I do not want one American life sacrificed for these shameless ignorant rats.

My American flag will fly upside down, in shame, as long as America continues to aid a nation of so little value. Alan LeTourneau Spokane

God’s truth better than `hazy mush’

I am somewhat baffled by Peter Dolina’s reasoning in his criticism of Hope Anderson’s valedictory speech (Letters, June 21). He labels the idea of absolute truth “dangerous nonsense” and dogmatically asserts “truth is relative itself.” Apparently, Dolina means there is no absolute truth, except for what he proclaims is true.

In a common faulty generalization, he likens those who espouse absolute truth to homophobes and medieval crusaders. Could I likewise imply that all homosexuals are pedophiles due to the actions of a few? Not even all who call themselves Christians truly are; only God knows hearts and will make that judgment.

Yes, the Bible says sin includes homosexual behavior, as well as coveting, pride, greed, lying, adultery and denying the truth, among others. But there is good news! In God’s words, often taken out of context, Jesus Christ said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Free from what? He went on to say, “from being a slave to sin,” as we all are.

Man’s flippant question, “What is truth?” is also answered by Christ: “I am the way and the truth and the life.” Note the definite articles - very absolute.

I would rather stake my future on the absolute truth of God’s word than the hazy mush of relativism. The consequences of being wrong are much worse for the relative thinker and the joys, present and to come, much greater for those who walk in the truth. Kathleen A. Hilliard Spokane