Widow grateful for home repair help
I wish to thank the Lookout Valley Lions Club and the neighborhood association for putting a brand new roof on my house. It was leaking badly, causing my ceilings to fall in. Due to my husband’s illness and passing this year, we were not able to replace or repair our roof.
I am grateful to the following people for their volunteer efforts: Chip Henderson of the City Council, Joe Graham of the Hamilton County Commission, Kevin Sams, a local contractor, Jerry Walls of the Lions Club and Walter Gienapp, pastor of Mountain View Presbyterian Church. Both of these men consistently contribute their time and energy to help our community in many ways.
Thank you for your kind and unselfish labor.
Carol Van Mersbergen
Foster grandparent feels rewarded
I want to put a plug in for an organization I found to be very rewarding, the Foster Grandparents Program. I’ve only been with the program a few months, but the experience has changed my perspective on education and the need for mentors.
Without a doubt, children need their education, but they also need to be nurtured, encouraged and feel a true sense that someone sincerely cares if they make it or not. Children in our schools need seasoned people in their lives – those who have been through the “trenches” and came out. They need people who will take time to help them develop life skills.
As a foster grandparent I am able to draw on life experiences to help children at an early age develop skills to make right decisions and good habits that will build character and respect. If you are a person 55 years or older and desire to be an influence in some child’s life, and have a few hours to sacrifice, I encourage you to consider volunteering as a foster grandparent. The rewards to you can’t be measured in money but in all the ways that truly last.
Elder Walter Harmon
Article on Islam a must read
In reference to the article by Shadi Hamid, “Why Islam isn’t like other faiths,” which appeared in TFP’s “Faith and Family” section on Sept. 24: I found it be well written and the best by far of any commentary I have seen on the subject. All Americans should read it.
My expertise in this matter is grounded in a master’s degree in Arab studies from the American University of Beirut and a dcotorate in Middle East studies from the University of Utah (one of my four fields of concentration having been Islamic law and political thought). Additionally, I spent a summer working with and living in the officers’ quarters of Jordan’s Arab Legion.
We need more articles like this to help us understand our American brothers and sisters. I firmly believe that those who have read this article now know more about Islam and American Muslims than 95 percent of their countrymen.
Mick Spencer
Dayton, Tenn.
Fact-based letters more interesting
According to deep-digging reporters, both Clinton and Trump are liars, period. Nonetheless, many letter writers feel constrained to point up, in defense of their own candidate, the shameless lying of the other candidate (which fact alone presumably makes him or her unfit to be president). Since both candidates are liars, anyone who calls one candidate or the other a liar out-hypocrites hypocrites.
What an irrational and emotionally charged dullness both sides tout! Given how impervious, naturally enough, a mind is to disbelieving its own construction of ideas and opinions, letters written to change someone’s thinking about who is the liar in this political debacle are worthless to rational debate.
Consider this singular fact: There are only two kinds of opinions, those that are interesting and those that are not. Perhaps readers constrained to write letters to this newspaper would make a greater effort at the former – especially when facts have no appeal to them.
Bob Miller
Signal Mountain
Can we heighten political debate?
The Pavlov party politics of twitters and screeches invade airways and newspapers while the prose of Jefferson, Madison, and Lincoln drowns in sarcasm and lies.
Rather than the Miss Universe supermarket stand for women, let presidential candidates engage in the fate of a woman poet. Dareen Tatour has been arrested for writing a poem offensive to the current Israeli government. The poem posted on YouTube is a call for resistance. Words sing and sting with a beat better than Thomas Paine’s revolutionary pamphlets.
Her words ring out: “Resist, my people, resist them. / In Jerusalem I dressed my wounds and breathed my sorrows / And carried the soul in my palm / for an Arab Palestine.” Pilgrims in Jerusalem carry their soul in their palm when they go to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Dome of the Rock or the Western Wall.
Poems incite emotion, perhaps better than newspapers, but the facts in the poem appeared in Israeli newspapers. A discussion of the case of Dareen Tatour in a political debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump might carry more weight than Miss Universe.
Kemmer Anderson
Letter missed point on blacks
I’m wondering what history lesson a recent letter writer missed when he opined the Civil War freed the slaves, and the civil rights movement was led by “American ideology [that] opened opportunities for blacks” as justification that blacks have received opportunities.
Is it an opportunity to be torn away from family on another continent to endure horrific conditions at sea, only to be brought to this country as property with no rights? The Civil War freed the slaves but not before white American plantation owners were forced to give up what was an unjust system that degraded the dignity and rights of human beings.
Fast forward to the 1960s, almost 100 years after the Civil War. Does the writer think whites were at the forefront of the civil rights movement? Some were, but for the most part it was blacks again enduring violence, prejudice and humiliating acts protesting to end segregation and voting suppression to receive full rights as citizens. “What our country has done for the blacks,” as the writer stated, is at best patronizing and at worst a complete lack of historical knowledge of what African-Americans have suffered for “what we have done” for them.
Rebecca Rochat
Where was schools concern years ago?
The Chattanooga Times opinion page is about three decades too late in addressing the real academic and learning conditions of our public secondary schools. Were the paper not so absorbed in echoing the viewpoints of the school board, administrators and teachers union, perhaps it would have shown a wee bit of curiosity and investigated the ongoing complaints of those who sought to improve the schools through innovation and hard work.
The warnings about the failure of administrators and unions has been a national topic, and no one can legitimately claim they didn’t know this was a significant public policy calamity. Further, if the elites lament that Trump supporters are uneducated, would not the logical conclusion be that they are products of the very school system the elites designed and ran?
Leah Geraghty
Signal Mountain