January 9th's Letters to the Editor

Dear Sir or Madam:

Whomever coined the phrase, “the dumb­ing down of Amer­ica” can rest easy now, because that goal has been achieved. How else can you explain that a major­ity of Vot­ing Amer­i­cans have re-elected the most inept Pres­i­dent the coun­try has ever had? When you con­sider the unem­ploy­ment rate rose to his­toric heights dur­ing his first four years. He has caused more debt than all of the pres­i­dents combined.

Regard­ing his Oba­macare, he, then Major­ity Leader Nancy Pelosi, made the assi­nine state­ment, “We have to pass it, to find out what’s in it”. Sounds like a slick used car sales­man, try­ing to tell some­one to go ahead and sign the pur­chase agree­ment and then I will tell you what is wrong with the car, but then some­how Mr. Obama and his min­ions, the main­stream Media, have con­vinced a major­ity of Amer­i­cans to go along with him, which only rein­forces the fact that we have indeed been dras­ti­cally dumbed down.

I don’t under­stand why folks, such as myself, and a few oth­ers, are con­sid­ered rab­ble rousers sim­ply because we try to get the mes­sage out there, that our Emperor’s clothes are not new, in fact he is naked. We may be accused of being arro­gant, in believ­ing that we know more than most folks, how­ever I believe that we are just more well informed and do not drink from the Kool Aid foun­tain of the Left­wing Media, who, if they were really as smart as they think they are, they would real­ize that his­tory proves that when a Tyrant comes to power, (which I con­sider Mr. Obama to be) the first peo­ple they dis­pose of, besides those who oppose them, are the News peo­ple. All you have to do is look at what hap­pened to pre-Hitler Ger­many and you will understand.

Am I com­par­ing him with Hitler? I sup­pose I am. I believe he is a power hun­gry mega­lo­ma­niac and prob­a­bly more harm­ful to Amer­ica than any out­side enemy. Am I para­noid? I guess I am that too, but as I have said before, Para­noid peo­ple have to be right some­time, but in this case, we as a coun­try and the grand exper­i­ment our founders envi­sioned will be a fail­ure, if I am right.

Some­one quoted John Adams recently, regard­ing our National Debt. ”There are two ways to con­quer and enslave a nation. One is by sword and the other is by debt.” Does this sound at all vaguely familiar?

Thank you, Darl Mills, Mt. Gilead

Dear Edi­tor,

I would like to take a few min­utes to express my con­cern about our pros­e­cut­ing attorney’s office. I was under the assump­tion they were there for the peo­ple of Mor­row County, that when a law was bro­ken they were there to see that the mat­ter was taken care of.

I have put in numer­ous calls and left mes­sages for a return call, as of yet not returned. I am told he’s in court or out of office for a while, but will be back in his office shortly and will return my call. I don’t under­stand why my call is not being returned.

A law was bro­ken and con­fessed to that they did it. Con­fes­sions have been taken from other crimes as the only evi­dence needed, why not this crime? Is it because it’s from the vil­lage of Edi­son or what? All crimes should be treated the same, not because they are friends, where they are from or for what­ever rea­son. A crime is a crime. Laws are there for a rea­son, they are to be upheld by the law, not by the way they want to uphold the law.

It is time for us as cit­i­zens to take a long look at our county gov­ern­ment and see that they are not really there for all of us, just who they want to be there for.
I totally believe in gov­ern­ment, but wish that it was done the way it should be done, not the way they want it done. I salute the ones that do their job legally.

This is my opin­ion and I just had to get this off my chest.

A con­cerned cit­i­zen, Ruth Davis, Edison

Dear Edi­tor,

I began read­ing the let­ters to the edi­tor in the Sen­tinel on Wednes­day, Decem­ber 19th. The first let­ter was about ban­ning ham­mers, because ham­mers don’t kill peo­ple, peo­ple kill peo­ple. To me, the word­ing of the entire let­ter was incred­i­bly sar­cas­tic & insen­si­tive given the killing of inno­cent chil­dren and their teach­ers in Con­necti­cut. I assumed the let­ter must have been sub­mit­ted before the school shoot­ings & I thought I would send a let­ter sug­gest­ing that the Sen­tinel should have con­sid­ered hold­ing off on print­ing the let­ter until the wounds were not so fresh in everyone’s mind. I was even more shocked, dis­mayed & dis­ap­pointed to see that the let­ter was writ­ten in response to the school shoot­ing and even worse was writ­ten by the edi­tor of the paper!

What a sim­plis­tic and sar­cas­tic response to such a heart-wrenching tragedy. I’m ashamed to sub­scribe to a paper that would allow its edi­tor to respond in this way. There are no sim­ple answers in response to this tragedy. But I do know that many peo­ple in our com­mu­nity are unwill­ing to be silent and wait for another mass killing to occur. It’s time for mean­ing­ful con­ver­sa­tion and action from those on both sides of the issue so I’ll end with quotes from both a Repub­li­can and a Demo­c­rat who both gave thought­ful responses, unlike the Sentinel’s editor’s response to the tragedy.

“Today, we as a nation grieve. Today, we as a peo­ple feel help­less. Help­less to stop these ran­dom acts of vio­lence that seem to be get­ting less ran­dom by the day … But every Amer­i­can must know — from this day for­ward — that noth­ing can ever be the same again.” — Joe Scar­bor­ough, con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­can who received the NRA’s high­est rat­ings over 4 terms in Congress.

“The fact that we can’t pre­vent every act of vio­lence doesn’t mean we can’t steadily reduce the vio­lence.” and “If there is even one thing we can do to pre­vent any of these events, we have a deep oblig­a­tion – all of us – to try.” —Pres­i­dent Obama

Kim­berly Tice, Exec­u­tive Direc­tor
The Ohio Asso­ci­a­tion for the Edu­ca­tion of
Young Chil­dren, Mount Gilead

Dear Edi­tor,

This is more of a pub­lic infor­ma­tion let­ter than an opin­ion let­ter. Over the past sev­eral years I have had a few friends who were vet­er­ans pass away. To my sur­prise their fam­ily had no idea where the deceased mem­ber left impor­tant papers that the fam­ily would need in mak­ing their funeral arrange­ments. Most impor­tant of these are their DD-214 or known as mil­i­tary dis­charge papers. They are given to those hon­or­able dis­charged vet­er­ans when leav­ing the mil­i­tary. These papers enti­tles that vet­eran to a mil­i­tary cer­e­mony, and which mem­bers of that branch of ser­vice the vet­eran was in comes to the ser­vice and folds and presents the US flag to the family.

Our vet­er­ans have earned this right. Our local funeral direc­tor will need a copy of the vet­er­ans DD-214 to start in motion the mil­i­tary honor guard to be at the funeral, for the vet­eran and fam­ily. Your local vet­er­ans’ groups some­times will pro­vide the fir­ing squad for that veteran’s cer­e­mony; the funeral direc­tor will take care of that. This paper is very impor­tant, so if you have loved ones that were in the ser­vice, you need to make sure that some­one in the fam­ily has a copy of that paper in hand all the time just in case. You can have copies made any place and our Mor­row County Vet­er­ans Ser­vice offers that ser­vice free. So please take the time now to check and find this impor­tant doc­u­ment, our vet­er­ans deserve this.

Thank you, Charles Popadak, Marengo

Dear Edi­tor,

Farewell Troop 30. My name is Ran­dall Craig and I was the Scout­mas­ter of Troop 30. Today Jan­u­ary 1, 2013 marks a sad day for me because Troop 30 was not allowed to rechar­ter and now the Troop is no more.

Most every­one has heard both sides of the story. There are those that felt as we did that we had every right to do our fundraiser and there are those that feel we got what was com­ing to us. We were warned that this could and most likely would hap­pen. I guess we were hop­ing for a dif­fer­ent out­come. There were 5 things that they say we were vio­lat­ing with our fundraiser and this is my per­sonal opin­ion on those points. First this should be a dis­trict run event. I agree with that. But after sev­eral years of try­ing to get the dis­trict to do it with no luck we pro­ceeded on our own with it. With their help and sup­port mind you. Oh and their rea­son for not doing the event was it would just be a has­sle and it wouldn’t make any money.

After two suc­cess­ful years they saw the poten­tial and wanted it for them­selves. Sec­ond was that we were prof­it­ing from other scouts instead of from the com­mu­nity. If you could see the prices at scout stores and the prices of sum­mer camps and high adven­ture trips you would ques­tion that point for­ever. Other troops and dis­tricts put on these events and they profit from the scouts in the same man­ner. Our event was actu­ally less than most and it included a hot lunch. I’ve been to sev­eral events where you had to pack your own lunch or a cold lunch was pro­vided. Unless its 100 degrees I pre­fer a hot meal. Third is the point that our scouts did’nt earn their own way. Well if the dis­trict peo­ple had been there at 630 in the morn­ing see­ing our boys set up the lunch area and help coun­selors take mate­r­ial to their class­rooms and mak­ing sure the class­rooms had all nec­es­sary equip­ment and then pack it all up and clean up at the end of the day I think they would recon­sider that point. Point four was we were com­mer­cial­iz­ing the scout­ing pro­gram. We used reg­is­tered coun­selors with approved BSA mate­r­ial. We did not mis­use any BSA materials.

All I can say on this point is we weren’t doing any­thing dif­fer­ent that the hun­dreds of other troops have been doing for years. Point five deals with paper­work. Units must sub­mit money-earning appli­ca­tions. To the best of my knowl­edge this was done prop­erly with the first two events since it was done by the troop. The third event was spon­sored by the Friends and Fam­ily of Card­ing­ton 30 and didn’t fall under their juris­dic­tion. Which causes me to ask this ques­tion. They said if Troop 30 puts this event on they would shut us down. Troop 30 didn’t put on this event. Why did they shut us down? I only got to be Scout­mas­ter for 1 year. Not nearly long enough to be even con­sid­ered a good one. As I under­stand it myself and the rest of the lead­ers from Troop 30 are barred from ever hold­ing another posi­tion with a scout troop. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be there for our boys. My son wants to con­tinue with the scout­ing pro­gram and hope­fully earn his Eagle. I will be there every step of the way.

Most of my scouts have already trans­fered to other troops and I wish them the best of luck in their scout­ing adven­tures. Sadly though we have had to move to another dis­trict and coun­cil. When you have been treated unfairly it is only nat­ural to seek out a bet­ter envi­ro­ment. To all the peo­ple and orga­ni­za­tions that Troop 30 ben­e­fit­ted I apoli­gize for the incon­ve­nience. They say there will be a new Troop 30 but that it might take time to reor­ga­nize. I hope they suc­ceed because Card­ing­ton really appre­ci­ated hav­ing a Troop. Well I think I’ve said my piece and its time to fold and box up my uni­form. Farewell, good luck in all your adventures!

Ran­dall Craig, For­mer Scout­mas­ter Troop 30

Posted by Taylor Kaser on Jan 8 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.