Thanks for helping feed the World Changers and other letters to the editors

Sunday, July 28, 2013

Thanks for helping feed the World Changers

I want to say a big thank you to the people who helped feed The World Changers the second week in July in East Ridge. World Changers are young people who came from across the Southeast to work on elderly or disabled people's homes for no charge. We provided lunch each day for the youth and the homeowners with help from: Mike at Quick Mart, East Brainerd Road; Gary at The Village Market, Collegedale; Mista at McKee Bakery, Collegedale; Julie and Matt at Zaxby's, East Brainerd Road; Greg and Dillon, Golly Whoppers, East Brainerd Road; Andrea, Little Caesar's, Ringgold Road; Joey at Salsarita's Fresh Cantina, Gunbarrel Road; Mike at Hungry Howie's Pizza, Ringgold Road; Jennifer at Subway, Ringgold Road, and many individuals.

These people helped a great bunch of youth love some people in our community.

- MYRA BURGESS, Cross Path Church


Poor, disabled take brunt of cutbacks

Has anyone besides me noticed that most of the government's cutbacks are aimed at the poor, disabled and seniors?

First, they talk about Medicare going broke. How can that be when they take $100 out of our Social Security check automatically when we turn 65? I saw in the paper that the cuts hit "Meals on Wheels." If they can't make us go broke, they want to starve us to death.

Thank God for volunteers and churches helping in Chattanooga. I live in Georgia. We have nothing like that. I need help with medications. Can I get it? No!!

Why not make the senators and congressmen give up a portion of their salaries? They sure don't do anything to deserve it. They just sit on their fat wallets and make cuts to the people who are not important to them.

Everyone in Washington needs to be voted out next year. It's time for a big change.

MARTHA BLEVINS, Rising Fawn, Ga.


City tolerates too much crime

I recently brought my family from Tuscaloosa to downtown Chattanooga for a weekend vacation. Your city is impressive. Chattanooga clearly has benefited from strong civic pride and honorable citizens.

Unfortunately, the experience was marred by a ubiquitous criminal element- vagrancy. Sleeping, yelling, harassing, flashing (yes), boozing and stinking. Your otherwise magnificent downtown is overrun with the same type of crime that New York City cleaned up 15 years ago! I personally confronted the criminals on two occasions: For yelling on the bus and for drinking, littering and then trying to get on the bus with beer. On a third occasion I notified your library's security guard that men were sleeping on the tables. Of course, there were many more times when I did not fight back.

Chattanooga's tolerance of this crime and its indifference toward its victims are shameful choices. Such wretched people evoke pity, yes, but these are adults who are responsible for themselves just like all the hard-working people there on vacation, not to mention our children.

So, good citizens of Chattanooga, please demand justice and do so now, before some atrocity inevitably forces you into action. It is your home, after all. Stand up for it.

ANDREW ALLISON, Tuscaloosa, Ala.


Preserve forest with Wilderness Act

I am writing today in support of protecting the Cherokee National Forest through the passage of the Tennessee Wilderness Act. Home to a wide range of game and non-game fish species, the Cherokee National Forest is truly a fisherman's dream.

I have fished with my son in most of the areas impacted by this bill including the Tellico, Watauga, Nolichucky, Little Tennessee and Bald rivers. The Tennessee Wilderness Act permanently protects forests in all of these watersheds, which in turn protects water quality and trout and small-mouth bass habitat. Clean water is not only essential for the popular trout fishery that fisherman like me rely upon, but also for downstream communities like Chattanooga.

In addition, my wife and I like to hike. We joined a Tennessee Wild hike into the Upper Bald River Wilderness Study Area a few years ago. This intact area is deserving of permanent protection.

I urge Sens. Alexander and Corker to reintroduce this bill posthaste, and I urge Congressman Fleischmann to support this bill in the House of Representatives.

LLOYD LEVITT, Signal Mountain, Tenn.


Blame Big Three for Detroit mess

Sen. Corker speaks from the heart. Hearts speak of emotion and not sense. Detroit was not destroyed by unions, but by the unwillingness of the Big Three to understand that the whole process of manufacturing. Business was changing, and they simply would not change. Back in the '70s, Detroit was told by government to obtain certain standards within five years. They cried for more time. Japanese cars came over the next year exceeding the standards. It has taken Detroit decades to even begin to equate the Japanese quality. Sometime in their early history, Detroit was given the opportunity to adopt the Deming system and did not do it. The system was adopted in Japan, and Detroit continued to build junk.

If ownership were ideal, there would be no need for unions. Today, unions are not so much fighting for wages as for ownership. This ownership comes mainly through the worker participating in management and job planning. When the worker has a voice and makes decisions, quality and production rise increasing profits and making the whole team proud owners. The gap between management and labor is still there and it will take the unions to make it go away.

WADE SWICORD


Treat all fairly despite skin color

Is walking a crime?

He was just walking, his feet making contact with the gray pavement, step by step. But he wasn't just any pedestrian; he was an African American teenager, hoodie up, cell phone in hand - he was the definition of a criminal. This is the stereotype that society has created of a criminal, the very stereotype that led to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin's murderer, who cloaked a beastly manslaughter behind the euphemism "self-defense." In self-defense of the boy whose only utterance was an innocent inquiry, "Why are you following me?" Yet somehow these words or perhaps something deeper, something he could never change, the color of his skin, ended his era as an innocent child and left him a criminal - a criminal who had still oddly enough done nothing. Even though I myself, as a person of colored skin albeit a different shade, have been blessed to never have experienced the scrutiny of these stigmas, I would like to acknowledge the tolerance of the African American community in dealing with unjust stereotypes like the one exemplified by the Trayvon Martin case. It is our duty as Americans to treat each and every citizen with equal respect, irrespective of the shade of their skin.

ANJALI CHANDRA


Don't use stores just for viewing

"Online sales tax loop." "Local businesses paying double." "One arm tied behind our back." Whoa! Collecting sales tax is one thing; local-versus-Internet competition is a different problem.

I am an Internet shopper, and I have owned and managed local businesses. Sales tax is not the chief force driving shoppers to the Web. Shipping and handling charges are often as much as that tax, and everyone who has made an unsatisfactory online buy knows that refunds or replacements can be painful, or impossible.

Local stores offer shoppers; (1) instant satisfaction, (2) seeing the item before purchasing, (3) returning unsatisfactory items. These advantages are enjoyed exclusively locally. Businesses should trumpet these facts.

The real problem is local shopping for online items. This is stealing from the store where you view the items. Local businesses lose the profit they should earn, the investment made in stocking the items, plus the payroll and costs of keeping their doors open every day.

This is a moral issue for every shopper: If you plan to buy online, but use local stores as a guide, you are a shoplifter in all but fact.

BILL LAUDEMAN