Hope for the future
Editor: I’d like to believe, along with my ten year old son who suggested it, that the person who took his bicycle (almost new, matte black with gold lettering, Specialized Hard Rock Sport mountain bike) on Saturday, January 31, from the Plaza might be “a homeless person who needed the transportation.”
In any case, I am reassured by my son’s empathy in the face of disappointment that there is hope for the future.
Carol Marcus
Sonoma
Film inspires activism
Editor: At the recent Sonoma Environmental Film Festival, the audience was inspired to take action after the screening of “River of Renewal” a documentary about restoring the Klamath River Basin and the removal of four dams. The removal of the four dams will be the largest removal of dams in our country’s history. Audience members pledged to send letters to their representatives in Congress and to the new Secretary of the Interior requesting that the agreement to remove the dams be ratified by the first of June.
As promised the film’s producer wrote a sample letter. It is posted on the festival’s Home page at www.seff.us. ; You can modify it or send it as is. The address for our new Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, who was President Obama’s choice, is included as are the addresses for Congress members Barbara Boxer and Mike Thompson. I ran into Rep Mike Thompson last weekend and he was happy to learn that he is in the film – that his interview did not end up on the (editing) cutting room floor!
Justine Ashton
Glen Ellen
Displeased with Obama
Editor: It seems that running a country is a little bit different than running a campaign, and a whole lot different than community organizing. Such would be a difficult task for anyone- but especially so for someone who was elected not for his qualifications, but for the color of his skin; not for who he is, but rather for who he is not. Barack Obama has now realized this in just his first three weeks as President. After having been the beneficiary of biased treatment by the American mainstream media, it appears President Obama assumed his choices for high level cabinet positions would enjoy the same blind loyalty and obedience granted unto him during his run for the Oval office. No fewer than four of President Obama’s top level proposed cabinet appointees somehow “forgot” to pay their taxes in the past few years. The most notable was former Senator Tom Daschle, the epitome of a Washington insider, who ultimately dropped out of contention claiming an innocent mistake. Is this hope? Is this change?
President Obama is using fear as the driving force behind his proposed stimulus package. Hyperbolically warning that “if we don’t move swiftly to put this plan in motion, our economic crisis could become a national catastrophe,” President Obama asks that we trust his untested capabilities, based on unproven experience, for our own good. This package, nearing ONE TRILLION taxpayer-funded dollars, is replete with pork and partisan projects that will neither stimulate the economy, nor be fiscally or ethically accountable to pass along to future generations.
So much for “hope” over “fear.”
Doug Nickle
Sonoma