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Letters to the Editor

Area Fire and EMS staffing

Little do we know, year by year, our public safety is slowly dwindling away. Rural Ohio, as well as Rural America, are facing a growing crisis as our public servants gets older and retires from their donated services to their communities when their bodies tell them they can’t do it any longer. It is time for someone else to step up and fill their shoes. The problem is, the somebody else’s are not stepping up. Records of most volunteer departments show that since their beginning, volunteerism was strong. Most departments through the 1900’s had no problems keeping a healthy roster ...

A word of HOPE

A recent chance encounter with a local activist who lamented the long-time frustration of working on issues like climate change, racial and gender equality, poverty and voting rights; while, applauding the emerging crop of younger activists gives reason to Hope. While it is true that the problems that face the United States and mankind in general have been with us for decades, the solutions remain elusive and unsatisfying. Sometimes it seems that even when we get what we are fighting for like “a Covid relief stimulus package” we are faced with a new threat, “inflation”. While we ...

We are your neighbors

I just completed reading Congressman Bill Johnson’s latest “update”, which is actually little more than a tirade against Democrats, antifa, and Black Lives Matter. There are so many issues that deserve a conversation, and perhaps we can discuss some of those at another time Congressman, and clearly there are many issues on which we will probably never agree. But as the chair of the Washington County Democrats, I resent that you constantly try to paint us as UnAmerican, when it was the far right who stormed the Capitol in an effort to overturn our democracy. It is the Ohi o ...

Tenacity

Human resilience is phenomenal in the face of all the tragedy we have endured in the past year and a half, not just in the USA, but all over the world as we know it. For many overcoming our circumstances has been rooted in a belief in a higher power, or belief in God to whom we turn when in distress and our survival is in peril. It is said, “there are no atheists in a fox hole”. With all the disarray that we have faced of late in America, we are visited with another tragedy, that of a collapse of a condominium in Florida. Even after days after the disaster, we clung to the hope of ...

What is the truth?

We seem to have a problem in this country with the truth. I blame elected officials for perpetuating falsehoods so they can stay in office. I also blame social media (like Facebook) for putting profit first when they provide a platform for those (even foreign countries) that would divide us along political and ethnic lines. Half of us get our news from Facebook which is not responsible for whether or not it is true. We had a presidential election. Democratic candidates Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won – eight months ago. So what is going on with former President Trump and a lot of ...

Need for renewables

I read the article in the Parkersburg News and Sentinel for July 13, 2021 where Representative McKinley was in Parkesrburg talking about carbon capture and the need to invest in it instead of eliminating coal and gas powered generation of our electricity. From the scorching heat, the wild fires, floods, it is apparent that we are in a climate crisis. The Representative said it would take 4,250 windmills to produce 3000 megawatts of energy. He said he didn’t think West Virginia wanted to give up the amount of land needed for that many windmills (850 square miles). How about we build ...