Letters To The Editor

WASHINGTON STATE

Our farmers are being held back

Wheat farmers in our Inland Empire region face another year of harvest blues. Traditional crops no longer sustain the income needs of family farms, while the corporate giants reap storybook profits at the retail end.

On the horizon of change in crop dollars is an old, yet new plant that offers inland farmers a return to financial stability.

Industrial hemp, with U.S. buyers, including steel producers, waiting, ready.

From his tractor seat, the Alberta farmer is speaking via mobile phone of his switch in 1999 to industrial hemp. Some plants are 12-14 feet tall already, on 10,000 acres. Buyers? Most are in the United States. Three states in the Midwest are gearing up to grow hemp. Demand is there, has been there.

Looking at Olympia and the Legislature, where is the encouragement to farmers? Can it be simply that most legislators don’t know a poppin’ Johnny from a harrow bar? Marc Ramsey Spokane

With help like Senn’s …

Insurance Commissioner Deborah Senn’s comments asking the people of this area not to blame her health care reforms for the current lack of availability of individual health plans struck me as ironic.

Insurance plans were numerous and affordable prior to her coming to Olympia. The liberal mindset of the administration demanded that everyone should be accepted for insurance, regardless of health. While this sounds like a nice thing to do, it was disastrous for HMO and insurance companies, with no way to make the percentages work. The concept will only work if you have a controlled group of risks. But all of a sudden, many new sick people, many of whom came to Washington just to sign up for the benefits, were turning in large claims. This plan was touted as “progressive thinking.”

However, since no business can survive when paying out more than it takes in and profit margins were small to begin with, many companies suspended plans or left the state.

Senn tried to mix free enterprise with socialism, which never has and never will work. She blames the insurance industry but fails to mention that Idaho and Oregon don’t have the problem we have here now. So, who is to blame? Gary Graupner Spokane

SPOKANE MATTERS

Pro-demolition arguments lame

In the public discussion of plans to renovate Lewis and Clark High School, much has been made of the unanimous support of the school board and staff for replacing the old administration building. The school board and building staff express bewilderment and indignation that their decision has proven controversial. The preservationists have been portrayed as “naysayers.”

I see this controversy, rather, as evidence of one of those cultural changes that happen so gradually as to be practically imperceptible. Contemplate another example.

Throughout most of the 19th century and into the 20th, educators insisted vehemently that flogging their students, boxing their ears and slapping their faces were essential elements of a sound education. More enlightened folks had come to regard corporal punishment as an outrage. Teachers and school boards are not necessarily right - not even when they hide behind the claim that their intent is to provide the greatest good for the greatest number. It took more than a century to get teachers to stop beating and slapping their students.

Teachers and the school board insist that razing the LC administration building will provide the best possible education for future students. Other folks see in this plan the senseless destruction of a historic building, an outrage. For them, the claim that only a new building can provide the best possible education is a subterfuge of air and fakery.

Public testimony of the school board and its supporters, so far, has been so vacuous and disingenuous that I’m pretty convinced that the preservationists are right. Wayne B. Kraft Spokane

Can `Doug-O-Vision’ show nausea?

The “magic” of Doug-O-Vision needs some fine tuning. Instead of a scene with Steve Eugster making a small girl cry, it should have shown a scene of me wanting to retch after reading Clark’s column.

Maybe we will be blessed with Doug-O-Vision in the new theater in River Park Square, so that all of the seats will be filled and the parking garage will be so full that we, the taxpayers, won’t have to foot the bill for that white elephant.

I doubt that anything will do that, even Doug-O-Vision. Ken Lawson Spokane

Spokane police, take a bow

Staff writer Tracy Ellig’s article on the arrest of alleged Internet child stalker Donald T. Townsend is heartening. It shows that Detective Jerry Keller knows how to make his bark worse than Townsend’s bytes.

Plaudits to Keller and the Spokane Police Department! The department deserves to “go down in history,” which is exactly what local author M. Kienholz accomplished in her recent hardback, “Police Files: The Spokane Experience 1853-1995.” If you haven’t read it, it is well worth reading, and shows the evolution of the department to its current level of proficiency.

Thanks to the officers who assisted in the case and the supervisors who approved of the assignment. John Canwell Spokane

We don’t want cram and jam either

Re: Staff writer Dan Hansen’s article, “Urban planners aren’t city slickers.”

It concerns me that nine out of the 10 individuals charged with implementing the Growth Management Act in Spokane County are not affected by the increased housing densities (smaller lots or more homes per acre) that the act creates.

It has been seen nationally and in our community that an increase in housing density is not what people desire. In a recent survey in the Nation’s Building News, published by the National Association of Home Builders, 83 percent of those polled preferred the American dream of owning a single-family home in a low-density neighborhood over a comparable townhouse in the city that was close to public transportation, work and shopping.

Is the planning community ever going to respect the lifestyle preferences of the average American? Are our elected officials ever going to stop this intellectual elitism that permeates the bureaucracy? Robert West Spokane

BUSINESS AND LABOR

Look at what Kaiser has stooped to

Staff writer Bill Morlin’s June 18 article about the Kaiser Trentwood replacement worker then being sought by the FBI is just one more example of the attitude Kaiser President Ray Milchovich, et al, have toward us Steelworkers. To consider a previously convicted bank robber in any way a replacement for one of my union brothers or sisters is an insult to every union worker.

We Steelworkers aren’t all saints, as a few of our rowdier members have proven. But contrary to the opinion of Kaiser management, we are not hardened criminals like Tom Curran.

On second thought, maybe we are saints. Consider that only a handful of us, out of 2,900, have so much as thrown a rock at a scab after eight months of these Judas goats’ taunts and threats.

While a Steelworker was being arrested for pointing a stick at a gate guard, I was on my CB, thanking the truckers who refused to cross our picket line for their foresight and integrity. I was told by two truckers that if I got in their way, they would shoot me with a .357 magnum and a 9mm pistol, respectively.

Kaiser and Spokane County need to realize who the criminals are and who the honest, decent people are in this conflict. Kaiser’s hiring of a bank robber to replace us brings an old phrase to mind: honor among thieves. J. Steven Dodge Spokane

Must `your store’ ride roughshod?

I have been dismayed to read of Albertsons effort to locate in northeast Spokane, taking over property occupied by the Charter Mobile Home Park.

This will mean completely uprooting the occupants, who it seems don’t have resources or influence to fight the move, obliterating their neighborhood, where they have lived for a number of years.

Hopefully, the store could find other areas closer to potential markets without disrupting this community. As of now, these folks are essentially left with no place to go, no means to get there. And help seems insufficient to go around.

Albertsons is a thriving business, expanding broadly, but is this compatible with its slogan, “Albertsons it’s your store”? Audry Cowen Spokane

Poor mouth, big boat don’t jibe

One night last week as my husband and I were driving down the road, we saw a sign in a truck that shocked us. It read, “Thanks to Kaiser, my children may go hungry tonight.”

What came as an even bigger shock is that this sign was in a brand-new Chevy pickup pulling a beautiful new boat, which was very big and very nice. If this man driving is so worried about his kids going hungry, maybe he should cut down on his material possessions and provide for his family. Let’s not be greedy and maybe this strike will end. Wendy K. Marshall Spokane

PEOPLE IN SOCIETY

Victimized - same ol’, same ol’

Diana L. Brooks writes a letter that begs for a response. She asks Sherry Lindquist and Larry Wood if they knew whom their ancestors were, where they are buried and where they lived before they came to America. The implication of insult is clear throughout her whole letter.

Apparently, some of my ancestors are buried under her ancestors. The early population of the Americas by other people not only predates modern-day Indians, it also raises questions as to how the Indians became dominant. While some evidence points to intercultural breeding, other evidence points to the use of violence and brute force to subjugate and destroy their predecessors. Wouldn’t it be ironic that the modern-day Indians brutalized and murdered my distant ancestor’s just as modern day Europeans brutalized them?

It seems that the guilt-laden pedestal that towers above us all is shrinking. Go figure. How many hundreds of years are we supposed to feel guilty for the injustices done to her that most likely she did to me, because her letter was full of the same old tiresome stuff that I have been hearing my whole life? Michael Harmon Spokane

So, shall we all just revert?

Slavery was once a traditional way of life and still is in some countries. So were cannibalism and human sacrifice. Wife beating was considered a wonderful way of life and completely accepted in our own United States. Maybe we should bring back these wonderful traditions and rituals along with whale killing. James L. Farone Spokane

`Bad dads’ all too common

If “bad dads” are a myth, as Professor Sanford Braver claims (IN Life, June 13), millions of American women must be living on Fantasy Island.

Unfortunately, deadbeat runaway dads are very real. Thus, the need for government agencies which track them down and enforce child support payments.

As for women initiating divorce being a “dirty little secret,” it’s no secret. Many women initiate divorce because their husbands are drunken spendthrifts who are already deadbeats, spending their time carousing and sleeping with other women instead of earning a living or spending time with their children. Marriage to such people is nightmarish, not mythical.

I realize that there are good divorced dads. I have been acquainted with several such men. Their existence, however, does not make the bad fathers a myth, but rather gives such bad fathers even less excuse for their behavior. Marian E. Hennings Spokane

OTHER TOPICS

Faulty system shouldn’t take lives

Re: “DNA test frees man after 16 years” (June 16).

We have seen headlines similar to this 61 times! Some of the innocents freed by DNA evidence had lingered on death row for years. Simple logic tells me that some innocent people have been executed before their DNA could be tested.

If you support capital punishment, is your cry for blood and vengeance so strong that you do not object to the murder of an innocent man or woman by the state in a ritual called the death penalty? What if that innocent man or woman were your child, spouse, parent or sibling? Would you object to the death penalty then? What if that innocent person were you? Then would you object to the death penalty?

The death penalty is not foolproof. I have been told by many death penalty proponents that it is an “acceptable risk” for one innocent person to die. If you feel that way, you are no better than the people from whom the law is designed to protect you. Deborah Lawrence Hale Greenacres

ACLU, library group are allies

Re: “Making Internet taboo a mistake,” Letters, June 4.

Peter C. Dolina mistakenly believes there is no comparison between the American Civil Liberties Union which he says should be outlawed, and the American Library Association, which has taken a strong stand against protecting children from pornography and obscenity.

In the 1960s, the Office of Intellectual Freedom in the ALA headquarters in Chicago became involved in the making of policy. Judith Krug became director of that office and in 1970, forged strong links between the ALA and ACLU. For a time in the 1970s, Krug served simultaneously as ALA Intellectual Freedom director and as a board member of the ACLU, which has given her several awards.

Krug has also been director of Freedom to Read Foundation which she herself describes as a “militant and activist” group. Freedom to Read joined the ALA in seeking to overturn the U.S. Justice Department’s Child Protection and Enforcement Act of 1991. The Freedom to Read Foundation has joined the ACLU in its campaign to abolish obscenity laws.

When it comes to the ACLU, the ALA and protecting children from inappropriate material, it’s not a matter of comparing apples and oranges, as Dolina claims. The ACLU and ALA are both rotten apples in our culture and society.

Toys R Us, on the other hand, has withdrawn its corporate financial support for the ALA’s reading rooms because of the ALA’s stand against protecting children. Toys R Us is to be commended for the socially responsible stand it has taken. W.J. Lawson Spokane