Police were wrong, reader says
I am a black citizen of Fayette County and a taxpayer. I think that paid policemen should protect all of the citizens, not just some. I also feel you become a police officer because you want to be one, just like teachers teach because they like to teach. We choose our profession, and we should be careful how we use it. These policemen were wrong. You don’t shoot someone running away from you. If that’s their policy it should be changed. I don’t recommend stealing cars or any other type of crime. I can’t see why two kind-hearted policemen would shoot a child in his back while he was running from them.
I had my car stolen while I was at work. It was three young black boys who stole my car, and not just that – they also wrecked it. I had a very hard time getting to and from work, but I still prayed to my God that they wouldn’t get killed in my car.
To shoot a 12-year-old child for a car is a sin. You can get another car, but you can’t bring a life back from the dead. Think about this you good policemen. What if this was one of your children?
Rev. Clara Yarborough
Allison
Reader says merit beats diversity
These past few weeks I’ve heard more talk about diversity in schools than I have the last two years. I believe most school principals and college deans probably do support diversity although it is a sideshow compared to merit.
For the sake of argument, let us assume a pro-diversity status: Make it mandatory for every school to have at least one foreign student in every class of every school from the 192 foreign countries that make up the world. You can’t be more diverse than that. Let’s take it a step further.
Have every foreign student give lectures about their cultural habits, practices and governments of their home countries. For instance, a student from New Guinea could give a lecture on the art of cannibalism.
I don’t believe the United States acquired the name “Melting Pot of the World” by accident. We are the most diverse country in the world. And yet, to pick a few races out of the 192 races that comprise the United States and offer them preferential treatment is so blatant it defies belief. All the advantages of “diversity” in schools, or anywhere, would probably fit on the head of a pin because the United States itself is diversity.
The advantages of pure merit have no limit and can never be measured. Merit is perpetual, diversity isn’t. Diversity is an innate trait; merit an acquired knowledge. I don’t believe merit requires diversity. I believe merit will survive on its own and in very good health without the assistance of diversity.
Randy Warnick
Smock
When corporations, rather than nations, rule
Our American service men were established as a defensive force pledged to defend the U.S. Constitution, not to serve in far-flung foreign countries as forward outposts for expanding global corporate empires.
It is easy to blame the government. But who is it that trusts elected politicians to look after sovereign U.S. interests? Who is afraid to stand and fight for their constitutional protections?
You can blame the major television networks for not having any passionate concern for the welfare of any small community. They manipulate opinion due to the loyalty they owe to the major sponsors who support them financially. But who supports the products of those sponsors?
Do you realize that your income- and property-tax burden is connected to the excesses of global corporate capitalism operating worldwide without growth regulations?
Have you ever heard any editorial on national TV espouse the breakup of vast corporate icebergs as our economy continues to drift aimlessly southward toward the spiraling vortex of global depression caused by a myopic, asymmetrical corporate globalization imperative, which is served by merging media market influences, who in return serve their corporate propaganda sponsors who are trump carding sovereign national governments everywhere?
U.N. economists recently revealed that 51 out of 100 largest world economies are now multinational corporations. Wal-Mart has higher annual revenues than many member nations of the U.N.
How did they get so huge? Does it have something to do with you, the consumer, voting out the small family-owned businesses in your community by withholding your support for local merchants in favor of supporting the big discount chain stores?
Can anyone name a greater threat to the health of democracy and freedom in the world than this unchecked corporate globalization disease?
The globalization imperative has at its service the wanton misuse of sovereign U.S. military power as well as economic sanctions against any nation refusing to knuckle under in the service of reshaping our planet’s geo-political boundaries as planetary resources are rapidly exploited for one-fifth of the world’s population.
Without such influences as the small-town, countywide, independently owned and operated newspapers, there would be no place to go to address the human rights threat, nowhere but the streets. Be grateful for the work being done at the Herald-Standard, for they have a stake in the future of your children, too.
Jim Lilley
Markleysburg