LETTERS: Saturday

Thanks for donations

My family and I would like to give a great big THANK YOU to the many people who helped us collect donations for the homeless this holiday season. We live in a senior park and have a monthly newsletter that goes out to all of the residents, we placed an article in it asking anyone for donations of clothing and shoes for the homeless this winter season. Like the rest of the community, our residents didn’t let the economy stop them.

We received many coats, hats, gloves, sweatshirts and many extras from our residents to donate. I would also like to thank the people who  gave extra when my husband and I were out shopping to pick up items for the homeless as well, once they found out why we were purchasing so many items.

After we piled everything in my mother’s house, we separated everything into like piles. In the end we donated 10 large black yard bags full of clothing and shoes and blankets, along with some homemade toiletry kits for the homeless. We loaded it all up in two vehicles and went to the Marian Soup Kitchen. When we arrived one vehicle was leaving and a gentleman on the dock was locking up for the day. He was on his way to a service for the homeless people who had passed away this year. He said that he would stay and help us unload our donations, as he was helping us, two more vehicles also had pulled in with donations, he again stayed to help them. As for the homemade kits, I asked him if he would be able to take them and distribute them. He told me that he would take them to the service and hand them out to the homeless people that would be attending the service. We all thanked him kindly for staying and helping and wished him and the Marian Soup Kitchen a happy holiday season.

Thank you all for everything you have done to make this a better holiday season for those less fortunate.

The Morton and Jozwiak family

Colorado Springs

Event not miraculous

The story of Tracy Hermanstorfer and her newborn son was inspiring, heartwarming, and wonderfully appropriate for the season.  I am so happy that she and her son survived the problematic birth, after both experienced cardiac arrest.  There’s just one problem:  There is no evidence that this birth was a “miracle”.

To call an event miraculous means to give credit to a supernatural agent, but I would suggest that credit belongs to the doctors and nurses who responded quickly and professionally to a rare situation.  Credit belongs to Becca Martin, who performed the cesarean section, a procedure that requires extensive skill.

Even if “all the typical reasons (for the arrest and the recovery) have been ruled out.”  That does NOT imply that the explanation must be supernatural. Our inability to find a natural cause to some event does not mean we can label the event as miraculous.  To do so only cheapens its real meaning.

Max Fagin

Colorado Springs

Climate change is real

Your editorial on Copenhagen (“Another Failed Climate Summit”) missed the point most worthy of consideration, at least among supporters of The Gazette editorial position; and that is that the whole world attended the meetings.  No fewer than 193 nations sent representatives and 119 heads of state attended.  These leaders were not there because they had “cherry-picked” data that best suited to their ideological preconceptions.  Rather they came because they knew climate change to be a clear and immediate danger to the planet. 

What Copenhagen showed is that there is no doubt among the world’s leaders — among the people actually responsible for the fate of both their own nations and the world — that global climate upset is real, that it is human-caused, and that it is a problem that urgently needs to be dealt with.  A world of nations that cannot agree on anything else agreed on this.

James Lockhart, Conservation Chair Pikes Peak Sierra Club Group

Colorado Springs

Final health care bill

Now that the Senate’s passed its health care bill, negotiations have begun over what will be in the final bill. 

This is when it is decided if the American people are going to come out ahead or if the insurance companies will win.  Anyone who thinks that health care reform is a bad idea has been seriously misled by the people who have the most to lose. 

Don’t be fooled —the insurance industry are the ones who are spreading the fear and the lies. Any bill that will benefit you and me, middle-class Americans, will take away from the profits of the insurance industry.  This has never been about ‘government run health care’; this is about Wall Street making as much money as possible from the sick and the dying.

So what do we want in health care reform?  We want health care that is affordable for everyone, not just the very rich.  We want reform that focuses more on prevention than providing care once it is too late. And we want health insurance companies to be subjected to the laws that prevent monopolies and price gauging.

This is the time for us to let members of Congress know what we want to see in the final health care bill.  And to stand up for health care for everyone.

Harry Green

Colorado Springs

Government not for profit

I am all for more efficient government, which is part of the reason I work in local government.  But I also take pride in public service and working towards the public good, whatever that may be according to the citizenry.  At the end of the day, that is the group for which I work.  At the same time so many of these recent editorials which advocate for competitive bidding for services and salaries is treading a dangerous line of running public government like a profit-driven business where the only bottom line is exactly that, profit, not the public good.  Government has multiple competing bottom lines, not just profit, and once we cross into the realm where government is only thereto make a profit, the question becomes who is providing that profit?  Could it end up being developers through development impact fees?  Or some other interest group that may better sway the direction of public policy?  The bottom line is that public government workers work for the public, and the always-changing bottom lines they put in front of us, not just to turn a profit. 

Now we just need to remind our elected officials who they work for, and then, hopefully, the public will begin to see a better return on their investment in public government.

Kati Carter

Colorado Springs

Health care concerns

Give Americans a bill that is not socialism. Congress should actually read the bill and not just vote along partisan lines. A national public option is designed to drive insurance companies out of business and subject us to government run health care. What has the government run that was not  much more expensive than forecasted? There will be rationing and death panels. The Democrats will just not call it that.

 The American public should not pay for abortions and call it women’s reproductive health care.

The Constitution does not give anyone the right to health care.

Jerry Dolan

Parker