Dear Editor,
I had been enjoying the series on the worst times in history until I got to the article, “And the rest ~ worst time in history,” in the November 7th issue. Refreshing my knowledge about how many horrible things we’ve overcome in the past as a country and as a collective world helps put current events into perspective. The Great Chinese Famine and The Great Leap Forward being two of the worst on the list, where the communist regime starved and killed 30-50 million people in a five-year period. I was very surprised to see on that list, beside the Trail of Tears, the Holocaust, and the Collectivization of Ukraine, was the Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision. I have multiple problems with this being listed alongside the aforementioned events.
The opinion that it was one of the worst times in history is just that: an opinion. The reality is that the majority of Americans support legal abortion and viewed the Roe decision favorably. The majority of Americans also did not agree with the Dobbs decision. The writer may have personal beliefs about Roe due to their circumstances, religion, or worldview, but there is a time and place to express those beliefs, and in a newspaper it’s called an opinion piece. Not all your readers practice the same religion or have the same convictions, so why slip in something so divisive and political into an article where every other event is a universally agreed upon tragedy? Nobody can argue that the Spanish Flu Pandemic or that World War I weren’t horrible events. They belong on that list alongside the American Civil War and the Black Plague because everyone is on the same page about them. Roe V. Wade is a different story. Putting that decision next to these disasters was just such a strange choice considering there were things like the Chernobyl Nuclear Crisis, the Iranian Revolution, and multiple other more deserving conflicts going on at that time. Let’s put this into perspective: any event from the 2008 Financial Crisis to the fall of the Soviet Union could have been chosen to end that article on, but the writer settled on an event that is highly political and still being hotly contested.
Everyone is entitled to their own beliefs and views, but a piece where statement of facts and impartial reporting are implied and assumed through the contents of the other accompanying articles, in a public newspaper, is not a place to display them. I have always appreciated the impartiality in the reporting and the variety of articles in The Times. If you want to share your views, I believe you should be more than welcome to write an article centered around it or a labeled opinion piece, but can we try not to mix those things with other articles? In a world where almost all news and media have a spin, I believe it is the duty of local papers to preserve the idea of the “good old days” where news companies practiced non-partisanship.
My hope is that the editors consider these points and be more mindful about which opinions go where.
Lorena Hamman
Harker Heights, TX
Dear Editor,
Over the years there have been many claims that the US Government has crashed alien spacecraft and even alien bodies in its possession. Folks believing this have for the most part not been taken seriously. Recent congressional hearings with DOD witnesses under oath and recordings from US fighter aircraft seem to indicate that there may be something to these claims.
Let’s assume UAPs, ie. UFO sightings are not exotic forms of ball lightning or other natural phenomena we are not familiar with and that this is true, then why have the aliens not collected their crashed craft or made contact?
Well, we might be in a similar situation to that of a stone age tribe that lives on an isolated Island off India. They are, for the most part, hostile to outsiders, having killed a number of people that ended up on their shores or wanted to make contact and despite their stone age technology use iron tips for their arrows no doubt fabricated from items that have washed up on their shores.
It could well be that these aliens, interdimensional travelers, or beings from the future look upon us in the same way as we do this primitive tribe, and they have as much interest in collecting their crashed space craft as we do in recovering a beat-up motor launch that washes ashore on this island.
If this is the case, we probably have as much likelihood of reverse engineering these craft as they do of repairing a gas motor on a wrecked boat.
If the gap in culture and technology is as great as that between the tribe and our civilization, we can only hope they continue to ignore us other than as curiosities.
Joe Kaffl
Hillsboro