Letters to the Editor: Sept. 1, 2023

Let’s start at home

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a leader who could bring us together. Presidents Biden and Trump have proven that’s not on their bucket list.

Mr. Bladine’s Whatchamacolumn urged last week that we address our own divisive habits first, and it’s hard to disagree with that. But, Jeb, do you read your own paper?

Your Viewpoints tagline reads, “Democracy thrives when honest opinions provoke public debate.” It seems, though, like honest debate should be two-sided.

Let’s start with Friday’s political cartoons. Pretty one-sided, eh?

Bumbling Joe Biden provides sufficient raw material daily to keep a cartoonist drawing for a month, but if he’s ever appeared in our paper, I must have missed it. The villain is usually Mr. Trump.

The guest commentary was a takedown of Gov DeSantis. And it seems like every issue is the same.

Whether you realize it or not, the News-Register does have an impact in our community. If we are to muster “the courage to fight polarization,” as you advocate, maybe we should start with our own newspaper.

Bob Lunt

McMinnville

Good news nuggets

I recently took time to catch up on News-Register issues that were piling up, and I am pleased I did. I needed to hear some uplifting news.

Just to highlight a few examples:

* Project Turnkey’s vital work providing transitional housing and other needed services to help solve our houseless crisis. Thanks all who are involved with this huge effort.

* The McMinnville School Board’s future goals, which are invaluable to our students, families, teachers and community.

“Providing relevant, rigorous and innovative academics that will eliminate disparities in achievement” is a goal that is positive for ALL of our students. Also, “supporting wellness, safety and social-emotional development will help ALL students increase their sense of belonging.”

Such a vital issue! Thank you, school board members.

* The school district’s Pre-K program, which introduces a structured environment promoting “free play” and concentrating on social skills and routines.

Rogue Primary in the Central Point School District does something similar for its K-2 students. Its website, found at https://www.district6.org/programs-of-choice, says:

“Our school places play at the heart of education. We are focused on providing an experience for our youngest learners that is full of joy, curiosity, and choice.

“We believe that school should be joyful, socially interactive, meaningful, actively engaging, and full of trial and error. We place a strong emphasis on practices that are developmentally appropriate and supportive of all learners.”

n Your Kid Scoop page, filled with enthralling facts and fun activities for our children. Thank you, NewsRegister, for promoting literacy and learning in our community.

Helping our voiceless ones is something we all need to take to heart. We become a more prosperous and inviting community if we do.

Liz Marlia-Stein

McMinnville

Horrors exposed

The governor of Florida recently implied slavery wasn’t so bad, suggesting it provided the opportunity to learn job skills.

Just days ago, a young white supremacist killed three innocent Black strangers in Jacksonville. Meanwhile, Florida and other states are restricting the ability to teach the real history of racism and slavery.

I recently read Frederick Douglass’s first autobiography, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” which revealed slavery was even more horrendous than I imagined. We all know of beatings and lynchings continuing into the twentieth century, and intense physical labor demanded under inhuman conditions. But the cruelty and mistreatment extended much further.

Douglass writes that he was separated from his mother “as an infant,” common practices even before the age of 12 months. He only saw his mother, very briefly, three or four times.

He describes being “kept almost naked — no shoes, no stockings, no jacket, no trousers, nothing” — as a boy of 6 or 7. He had no bed beyond an empty cornmeal bag laid down on a “cold, damp, clay floor.” His feet were so cracked with the frost of Maryland winters, the gashes grew as wide as the pen he was now using, in his 20s, to write his account.

“Our food was coarse corn meal boiled,” he wrote. “This was called mush. It was put into a large wooden trough, and set down upon the ground. The children were then called like so many pigs they would come and devour the mush; some with oyster shells ... some with naked hands.”

This autobiography should be required reading for every highschooler. It’s only about 90 pages.

We need to accept the fact we of white society debased, degraded, enslaved and brutalized Blacks for more than 300 years. Slavery was a crime against humanity.

Les Howsden

Amity

Question everything

I’m writing in response to an article in the 8/29 issue of the News-Register about the pending release this fall of a new COVID vaccine, specifically the paragraph that starts, “It is noted that ... “

We live in a fear-based society. I’m disputing the scare tactics and hype about new variant EG.5.

In a Journal of the American Medical Association article published Aug. 18, the World Health Organization rated the risk from EG.5 as low. JAMA also stated that people who contracted COVID, but did not get vaxxed, were immune to subsequent variants.

In 2020-22, I observed psychology of totalitarianism behavior (see: Desmet, Arendt).

Remember George Orwell’s 1984? I believe we experienced an Orwellian episode that merits big screen horror film status if and when it comes out.

The saddest scene may feature children.

Before we began vaccinating children, we had no child deaths from COVID. But some children did die from vaccination (see: Malone). And statistics? Even the death of people who had the virus and died in auto accidents were counted as COVID deaths (ibid.).

“[C.S.] Lewis … warned of a dystopia where public policy and even moral and religious beliefs would be dictated by oligarchs only too eager to assume the role of our new cultural high priests,” Everett Piper said in reference to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022 and the chief medical advisor to the president in 2021 and 2022.

Let’s exit Plato’s cave to see the light of day. Let’s refuse to be lab rats in another scientific experiment on an epic scale.

Question everything and everybody. Ask for proof the vaccines work, which hasn’t been forthcoming so far (Malone et al.).

Let’s do it to at least save our children.

Sheila Hunter

McMinnville

Editor’s note: Some claims by Robert Malone about COVID-19 have been supported, but many others have been disputed or debunked by scientific evidence. Readers are invited to investigate claims about the COVID pandemic and related vaccines, confer with health professionals and reach their own conclusions.