17-Year-Old Kavanaugh
Dear Editor,
Recently several politicians have been ruined by old accusations.
The Judge Kavanaugh accusations are concerning. They point to problems with justice and healing from sexual assault. The accuser should be listened to. But the accused deserves an unbiased jury. It is now on display in front of the entire country for political reasons. The senator who first mentioned this accusation ran with it for political gain knowing any accused would challenge unnamed accuser.
Like many of the previous accusations, this one occurred decades ago. However, this one involves drunk teens. They weren’t just drunk, they were underage drunk. They are not the age to make legal decisions. So they lacked both common sense at baseline and self control.
Despite this sexual assault is never excusable.
The difficulty with this case is that if teen Kavanaugh were found guilty when this occurred, in many states he would have been punished as the juvenile he was. His court records would have been sealed. That’s if he were found guilty.
I can understand why the accuser is upset. But please remember, 17-year-old Kavanaugh is being accused. Not middle-aged Kavanaugh.
The individual who shouted this issue to the entire country despite the accuser wishing for anonymity was a politician during a political debate. The accused request for anonymity was destroyed.
Now we are all judging what happened whether we want to or not.
Alan Burke
Can Control Diet
Dear Editor,
Beyond the widely reported devastating impacts of Hurricane Florence on the Carolinas, there is one more – of the self-inflicted variety.
North Carolina is home to thousands of factory farms that raise millions of pigs, chickens and other animals for our dinner table. Their feces are stored in huge open pits, labeled ironically as “lagoons.” The excess rainfall from Florence is very likely to spread much of this waste onto nearby housing developments, farmland and waterways, including those supplying drinking water.
This is exactly what happened when Hurricane Floyd struck North Carolina as a Category 2 storm in 1999. According to the Associated Press, “The bloated carcasses of hundreds of thousands of animals bobbed in a nose-stinging soup of fecal matter, pesticides, fertilizer and gasoline so toxic that fish flopped helplessly on the surface to escape it.”
Although none of us has direct control over the weather, we each have direct control over our demand for animal food products: the very food products that cause so much damage to our environment and to our personal health. The advent of Florence presents a great opportunity for each of us to start reducing that demand.
George Newcomb
No License to Kill
Dear Editor,
You have probably heard about the Dallas police officer, Amber Guygen, who went into the wrong apartment and killed the unarmed man who lived there. The family of the victim, Botham Jean, want the officer to be fired. So do I. I think that there should be a national law, constitutional amendment or police union rule that says that any police officer who takes a life can no longer work in law enforcement. No police officer should have a “license to kill.”
Chuck Mann
Always Have the Poor
Dear Editor,
Under every system in the world we still find the rich and poor among us.
Our liberals here, who were so sure they could solve all of our problems and avoid our unwanted “busts” by governmental intervention, have failed. Far better it would have been just to let the very successful who made their fortunes during the boom times pay their dues in the bust times that naturally follow than to destroy the value of hard earned dollars from inflationary theories and inferior economic ideologies. At least, it would have given the poor and middle class a better chance to become wealthy themselves than to have betrayed their future expectations by deceptively creating devious illusions for them. However, if their intent was to keep the poor forever poor, it has worked.
With our system of government, we need governmental compassion helping the helpless and then giving the power back to the people. All of us would, then, have a better chance of becoming wealthier.
The more we leave our capitalistic structure, the more we have continued to destroy our democracy and our wealth. Unchecked, we ultimately will lose the freedoms we now enjoy. Wrong perspectives will always give wrong results and, finally, capitalism is somewhat like the survival of the fittest in a jungle, but what has ever survived for as long and offered so much to so many?
Ray Hylton
