COVID, vaccine, driving challenge, raceway, sheriff questions and other Herald letters
Driving challenge
Will You Take the Week Without Driving Challenge?
What is it like to try to get around your community without driving yourself? For people who can drive, and can afford a car, this isn’t something you think about. But for nearly a quarter of the people in our state - people with disabilities, young people, seniors and people who can’t afford cars or gas, this is their every day.
I am one of these people. I live in the Tri-Cities. Pasco, to be exact and get around by my caregiver and friends and family. Some of the barriers I face on a regular basis include reliable transportation when my caregiver goes home. As well as crumbling infrastructure around my neighborhood and throughout my community.
I was living in Oakland, California when I suffered a brain bleed that left me disabled in 2015. After spending two months in a couple hospitals and a rehabilitation center, I moved back to my hometown of Pasco, Washington to rehabilitate with friends and family. I haven’t driven since. I find it difficult asking for rides.
The decisions elected leaders make around transportation planning, policies and funding impact all of us, and we want you to have the opportunity to learn with us. That’s why I’m joining the Disability Mobility Initiative to invite you to join us for the Week Without Driving, this October 22-29. Will you join me? Details at www.disabilityrightswa.org/nodriving/.
Jaime Torres
Method for picking sheriff flawed
I find it very disturbing that the candidates for replacing our removed sheriff was chosen by a bunch of Republican hacks based on whether they were Republicans and fell in line with their ideology and were willing to to disregard any state or federal laws that don’t align with their ideology. Given that I have no confidence that the individual they just placed is nothing more than an ideology zealot that answered yes to all of their political questions with few actual qualifications.
Politics have no place in choosing our sheriff. Benton County is made up if people from all the different parties, religions, non-religious and races, and our sheriff needs to represent all, be elected, not be chosen by a bunch of party hacks and their ideology. Our sheriff should be elected based on their experience and qualifications to do the job, not what party they belong to and how closely they follow the ideology of that party.
Vickie Elkins, Kennewick
Glad to see raceway is open
I’m glad to see the old Tri-City raceway is back open. I really think it’ll be a big asset to the local community. The race going on over this weekend is proving that’s the case.
I think the organizers seriously underestimated the crowds. The on-site parking was full hours ago and now folks are parking on Van Geisen and Keene Rd and the new police station construction site and everywhere else they can find. I live 1/2 mile from the track and folks are parking on our street.
I’d like to think the West Richland PD would be on site directing traffic but they are no where to be seen That would help a lot.
Congratulations to the Red Mountain Event Center for a really successful weekend. Now let’s figure out what to do about traffic
Brian Smith, Benton City
A civics lesson is apparently due
The idea that “we are all in this together” is about as un-American as it gets. This country was founded in defense of individual liberty. Frankly, those who actually think that the sacrifice of the individual over the group is a good idea, should review the events that preceded the 1917 revolution and World War II. Horrible things happen when dissent is not permitted.
Again, for those in the back: Republic.
“We are all in this together.” Today’s Translation: Self-imposed enslavement to each other with the terms set by the worst sort of busybodies imaginable, progressive Marxists. Who would’ve thought the greatest cultural and economic driver of the planet for the last 200 years would be taken down by a bunch of cowards and ingrates spouting revisionist history while riding the coattails of a cold virus.
Unbelievable.
I digress.
You can’t legislate morality. Nor should you want to. Those who do are suspect. Your fear isn’t my responsibility. Nor is your health, your safety or your mental state. I am not accountable to you. if you disagree or try to qualify those ideas, then you are the problem.
Freedom is a better idea.
Jeremy W Owen, Kennewick
Why no opt-out on long-term care?
Questions remain on state’s new long-term care insurance...My husband and I are saving our pennies to retire in the next two to three years. This LTCI has no benefit for us, yet we are forced to pay. I am so tired of governmental overreach for a benefit I do not want. Why can’t we opt out? Why is this tax forced on us? We don’t need LTC help, we did not ask for it and should not have to pay it.
Ellen Hendricksen, West Richland
Help people, not Hanford plant
In Monday’s paper there was a front page article about saving a rare plant (bladderpod). In order to save this plant, which numbers in the thousands, $2.7 million would be needed. It seems to me that this amount of money would find a better use if applied to house the homeless, feed the hungry, aid the needy veterans, etc. It just isn’t logical to save “thousands of plants” when there are many needy people in our area.
Jerry Johnson, Kennewick
COVID-19 has split us big time
Our nation, state, and our community are divided. Big time!
And what is it that divides them? Among other reasons, I would offer fear as the first and foremost reason. I believe this fear is mostly from COVID-19 issues and related sequelae; namely unknown or perceived risk of the disease and death to themselves and their loved ones. And unknown or confused reasons for continued lockdowns, masks and vaccine mandates that may affect and/or threaten their lives, livelihoods and families.
Our normally trusted institutions at the local and national levels are not providing answers to the skeptical public with large double-blind studies and mounting evidence, but instead provide cover for or even permission for the censoring of any discussion and proposed evidence of opposing views to the CDC or NIH public COVID-19 narrative and directives. Even the president of the United States of America is losing “patience” with the non-vaccinated public, which does anything but build confidence to his cause.
How about letting the evidence speak for itself by allowing ALL evidence to be viewed, weighed and evaluated without any filters. That just might build back some trust and help unite this fractured mess we are in.
John Rose, Pasco
Vaccine similar to auto seat belts
A personal perspective to the vaccine debate is found in my great grandmother’s personal history. Just over 100 years ago she stated, “I would have paid any price or undertaken any hardship” for a vaccine that likely would have saved from death her husband and young adult daughter from the Spanish influenza’s epidemic of 1917. Today, the COVID-19 vaccine is offered in most cases for free, yet the hospitals and ICUs are full of mostly COVID-19 patents who did not take advantage of it.
Inoculation/vaccine mandates in the USA go back 200+ years to George Washington’s army of 1775 and more recently for school children for polio/measles/mumps/smallpox in the 1950s and 1960s.
Consider the mandate of seat belts. Data has proven seat belts help more than harm in about 99.5% of all serious accidents. The <1% probability seat belts will not help or cause more harm than benefit does not deter any rational person from using seat belts. Any thinking person looks at the odds and wants to be in the 99% group, and they wear the seat belt. Maybe we should look at the vaccine that same way.
Michael Scrimsher, Burbank
Vaccine mandate not the solution
Just food for thought. At no point, in the six millennia of recorded human history, have those forcing others to comply, ever been the good guys. Not a single time in 6000 years, and that’s not going to all of a sudden change in 2021.
Michael Darrin Anderson, Kennewick
This story was originally published October 22, 2021 at 12:22 AM.