To the Editor:
Recent letters to the editor seem to indicate that the “No Kings Rally” March 28th scared some in the community. For those who may be wondering why we would rally, I offer this summary.
The United States is a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can’t cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage.
We lock up more of our own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven’t even been convicted of anything. They’re just too poor to make bail.
Our life expectancy is going backwards. We’re the only developed nation where that’s happening. Our infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba’s. Our kids do active shooter drills between math and English classes.
Our minimum wage hasn’t moved in 15 years. We’ve got teachers working two jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and we’re spending a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn’t attack us and that our grandchildren’s grandchildren will still be paying for.
We stood on March 28 for America, the First Amendment right of free speech and assembly. We stood so the 58,000 deaths in Vietnam and 7,000 in Iraq and Afghanistan to protect those rights do not stop meaning something.
David Bott
Morgantown and Arbovale
Dear Madam:
I wrote a facetious letter to the editor a couple of weeks ago about the “No Kings” rallies that took place in cities and towns all across this great land of ours and apparently offended 57% of the American people—at least that’s what one of the follow-up letters to the editor said. My letter was deemed an attack on the rally goers’ first amendment rights, notably the freedom of speech part. I should have heeded the warning of my old friend Sonny, who proof-read the letter and then commented – ”quite the steaming pile.”
I’ve always been a great believer in the first amendment and freedom of speech, and I would never want to deny anybody their right to their own particular soap box. If we had left it up to MAGA people, for instance, we would not know that men could get pregnant, the most momentous scientific revelation in a century. And that led to the discovery of multiple new genders, the proper pronouns to call all these new genders, and many new classifications of personal relationships. We would not have had the political wisdom of David Hogg; the lyrical music of Bad Bunny; or the humor of Bill Clinton when he said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, not one time, no-sir,” – all right there for us with the first amendment and our freedom of speech.
The ill-fated Biden administration sent a big bullet toward destroying that freedom of speech a few years back with the formation of the Disinformation Governance Board. This board was under the control of the Department of Homeland Security and that strange little man with the PhD in Communications from Baghdad Bob University, Alejandros Mayorkas. He appointed, as executive director, a deranged woman named Nina Jankowicz, a woman that would have been right at home on the set of “Bride of Frankenstein.” She wasted mation status to a host of publications and websites that, oddly enough, seemed to all be conservative. This Disinformation Governance Board was disbanded after a couple of months when a few congressmen somehow located the spines that they had discarded years ago and put an end to it. They concluded that you really couldn’t have freedom of speech if you put restrictions on it. Well now, ain’t that special! Who said politicians were dumb!
As an apology to the rally goers for the confusion about my take on their “No Kings” demonstrations and their freedom of speech rights, I would like to recommend an evening of song and drink. The song is a beautiful one about freedom of speech called “A Place in the Choir.” Open up YouTube, queue up Celtic Thunder’s version of that song, grab a cold bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill wine, sit back and be thankful that we have a Bill of Rights included in our constitution and a government that no longer includes the Bride of Frankenstein and a Disinformation Governance Board!
All God’s creatures have a place in the choir,
Some sing low and some sing higher.
Some sing out loud on a telephone wire,
And some just clap their hands or paws or anything they got.
John Jackson
Huntersville
Editor,
Give Me Shelter
According to Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, human primary needs are, in order of priority: food, shelter and sex.
Dwelling, as he did, in Vienna, water, and water shortages, were obviously far from his thoughts, and, again, given his cultural milieu, perhaps it isn’t surprising that he overlooked our craving for love, affection and connection, which also seem insufficiently prioritized in Pocahontas County, among other places.
As for food in the Green Bank environs, for those alienated from the S.A.D. (Standard American Diet) and wishing to adhere to a healthy diet, the area is in large part what health aficionados term a “food desert” and so a long drive and large refrigerators are therefore the order of the day.
Sex is outside the realm of this essay – sorry, comrades.
The second item of Freud’s pithy list – shelter – lends itself to considerable difficulties, especially for electrosensitives forced to distance themselves from their WiFi-projecting neighbors.
In a more fair-minded society microwave radiation, given its pernicious health effects, would be legally regulated, like second-hand tobacco smoke, and limited to the confines of property boundaries. Given that this isn’t the case, decent accommodation free from one’s neighbor’s spillage of microwave radiation is hard to locate.
And just why does this subtle poison need to extend beyond property lines?
In France, I have seen an electrosensitive having seizures from exposure to recording equipment, another electrosensitive – an otherwise emotionally controlled type of woman – burst into a brief lachrymal episode from the radar on a low-flying plane, and I met the doctor of an older woman confined to a trailer in the far corner of a grassy field because of her inability to sleep – at all – in microwave-saturated airspace. A much-discussed couple were avoiding EMFs by living in a cave.
Those affected are an international phenomenon, yet we receive little sympathy, no disability support, and there are no refugee camps for us. The nearest we can come to a safe haven is the Quiet Zone and, sometimes, independent camping; not a viable option in this locale’s frigid icy winters.
What to do for shelter?
We are experiencing both that long-standing collective denial of the validity of our condition, and a housing shortage. Do please explain to me why we would give up our homes, our loved ones, our ways of making a living, and travelling – in my case – to move to such an isolated location, if symptoms of desperate ill health had not driven us to it?
Denial is a cozier option than the acknowledgement of uncomfortable truth, but the truth does not metamorphose in the process.
Meanwhile – can anyone offer viable options for that second item of Freud’s list of human necessities?
Some of us stand much in need of shelter.
Clover Kreger
Dunmore
