Fawning over queen nauseating
While all too predictable, the performative mourning by everyday Americans over the peaceful death in her own bed of an obscenely rich, 96-year-old English aristocrat (Elizabeth II) nevertheless is nauseating.
Such fawning amounts almost to traitorous amnesia. The shivering, fever-wracked patriots who suffered and bled at Valley Forge or crossed the ice-strewn Delaware River with George Washington to attack grog-swilling Hessian mercenaries who were happily murdering them would not have been so forgetful. They knew who was paying to have them slaughtered: the same English monarchy whose dim, over- privileged successors still trod the wandering footsteps of the frothing-mad King George III.
Americans have always felt a misplaced, unreciprocated fondness for our English cousins. With the exception of World Wars I and II, when the British needed Americans to save them from their own German cousins, European public opinion polls have consistently found the highest incidence of anti-Americanism in Great Britain. British gratitude, it would seem, is as short-lived as American historical memory.
It is doubtful such sentimentality is shared by the multitudinous Asian, African and Latin American countries once viciously subjugated and exploited -- as were the American colonies in their time -- by their greed-gorged English occupiers.
Roy Morris Jr.
Waste reduction, recycling regressed
The Chattanooga region has regressed in waste management practices. Recycling went to hell in a handbasket when elected officials drank the single-stream Kool-Aid. Single stream was initiated by major garbage haulers, an industry that profits when we generate waste. Who will lose, if we reuse? Garbage haulers.
Single stream is the antithesis of original waste reduction programs which taught people how their lifestyle, consumer and disposal choices affect others.
Pay As You Throw garbage collection and recycling transparency ordinances should be the norm. Citizens need to see, in real time, what is being dumped from garbage and recycling trucks. Maximizing recycling drop-off centers and minimizing curbside collection would decrease residential street wear and tear from heavy truck traffic.
Drop-off centers should be park-like educational centers promoting waste reduction, reuse, repair, etc. These centers should provide volunteer opportunities for citizens to see firsthand what it takes to collect marketable recyclables. Volunteers make the best peer teachers. Technology alone will not clean up the planet. And finally, production of unnecessary plastics must cease.
Louise Mann
Signal Mountain
Duluth housing can show the way
On a recent trip to Duluth, Minn., my friend John, a social worker, told me how that city had almost done away with homelessness by increasing building of low-income housing. The community came together -- social workers, law enforcement, health care workers, city planners, politicians and, most importantly, the vast majority of taxpaying citizens -- and committed to this obvious solution. They considered the homeless to be part of their community, so they built the housing throughout the community, not separated and closed off from it.
When I returned to Chattanooga, the South Broad District baseball stadium and development were in the news, and it seemed a unique opportunity for Chattanooga to follow Duluth's example, to have an even truer community, one in which all citizens are equally respected. Chattanooga is a bigger city than Duluth, so the challenge is bigger, but including low-income housing in the South Broad project can bring us closer to an inclusive community.
This is not an issue of charity. It is an issue of how to expand and deepen us toward increased connectedness and security. Above all, community must strive for that mystical unity and then the reality of a home for all.
Dr. Buzz Sienknecht
Wamp on wrong foot on stadium
Dear Mayor Wamp: I hate to tell you this, but you have started out on the wrong foot.
When you were a candidate for mayor, you said the deal for a new baseball stadium was bad for the taxpayers and should be renegotiated. We watched as the powers that be in Chattanooga and Hamilton County ignored your words and proceeded to do what they wanted to do.
As soon as you were sworn in as our new county mayor, you rolled over and played dead, thereby establishing the fact that there is no price to be paid for ignoring your words.
This is a big disappointment for many of us who voted for you because we believed you were right about the new stadium. We thought that once you were elected, you would force the issue to be reconsidered and that we would obtain a better deal with things like guarantees from the Lookouts' owner and Major League Baseball to keep the Lookouts in Chattanooga at least until the bonds for the stadium are paid off.
Please take another look at the stadium deal.
Jim Olsen
Diverse learning vs. indoctrination
Concerning the writer whose letter to the editor was published on Sept. 4, regarding public funds being given to private religious schools, which I strongly oppose, let me point out that the writer failed to answer the question presented: "Shall the Commission next authorize funds for the Annoor Academy, a private Muslim school in Chattanooga?" What is the writer's answer to that question?
The writer also misses the point about public education vs. private religious school indoctrination. The writer never uses the phrase "private religious schools" but only use the phrase "private schools." Why did the writer leave out this distinction? I do not believe that Baylor, McCallie or GPS are asking for public funds.
The goal of private religious schools is to indoctrinate their students in whatever the founders of the school believe. They have every right to do this, but not at public expense. Public schools are open to a diversity of opinion, some of which you may agree with and some of which you may not.
It is, in fact, a choice to use public funds to support religious indoctrination or to use public funds to support public diverse learning schools.
Erskine P. Mabee
No success, but socialists persist
In September 1905, a group of socialists met to strategize the overthrow of the Christian worldview and replace it with the ideas of Karl Marx. Meeting were Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Clarence Darrow, strategizing to infiltrate colleges and organize. A Harvard chapter was headed by Walter Lippmann, and Walter Reuther later pushed socialism at Wayne State University. Also sympathetic to socialism were W.E.B. DuBois, a founder of the NAACP and later a member of the Communist Party, and Victor Berger, the first Socialist congressman.
In 1921, the group's name became the League for Industrial Democracy to create a new social order based on production for use and not profit. That was the system used by early Pilgrims, who began to starve and not have enough clothes and shelter until their governor, William Badford, assigned each family their own plot of land and allowed them to market their crops and products, keeping part of the profit. Then they had abundance.
Socialists have never had any long-term success, but they keep trying.
Clinton Grant
Rossville, Ga.