Letters to the Editor (Aug. 21)
Be quiet and listen
The thoughts below express a view seldom heard during the rancor of today's America. Given the ease that misinformation can travel over the Internet, a thinking person has to wonder if hostile entities outside our country, as well as manipulative individuals with an agenda inside the nation, are not busy at work, hammering away at the wedge that divides us.
Avoiding polemics and hearing what that other fellow who disagrees with us thinks is a valid first step in recovering a sense of national unity.
Leland Johnson, Wichita
A free press
No matter if you read The Eagle, the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, you will be an informed citizen. This is not to say you’ll always agree with your paper’s coverage or its opinion pieces, but in reading the press you’ll have the knowledge necessary to form your own opinions.
A free press is essential to democracy. Calling reporting you don’t like “fake news” is wrong, and calling journalists the “enemy of the people” is dangerous to democracy and should not be tolerated. Following the lead of the Boston Globe, hundreds of newspapers came together to underscore the importance of a free press and I stand with them.
The Supreme Court in 1964 said “Discussion must be uninhibited, robust and wide-open.” Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
It is more important today than it was in Jefferson’s day, or even in 1964, that our press remain free. Without the press to speak truth to power and to question that power, democracy is doomed.
Barry Gaston, Wichita
Medicare for All
We need to expand Obamacare into Medicare for All. Having a system that negotiates drug prices like in Canada and the United Kingdom, where drug prices are really cheap, is the only way our nation becomes No. 1 again in health care.
Those elected to represent us — Rep. Ron Estes, Sen. Jerry Moran and Sen. Pat Roberts — need to reach out across the aisle to Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi to make this happen.
Their family and friends, as well as our families and friends, are at stake. The vets. The elderly. Our broken system of the George W. Bush years had no protection for patients. Obamacare fixed that. Now the insurance companies are charging way too much, and they need to be fixed as well.
Rodger Nugent, North Newton
Climate change generalities
The July 25 Eagle opinion piece, “Climate change is cooking the planet and our workforce,” is just another in a long series of dire warnings that our civilization is condemned to certain and imminent catastrophe unless we immediately stop climate change by drastically reducing carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
The doom and gloom mongers agree that this can be accomplished only if we are willing to live austere lives and do such things as use bicycles, take cold- or two-minute showers, use one square of toilet paper, not eat meat, travel by public transportation, and ladies should turn off showers when they shave their legs. But they wisely avoid making definitive time predictions.
Not so with Al Gore, the chief alarmist. In his overconfident zeal he has repeatedly made specific predictions, each one of which has crashed and burned. Eighteen years ago, he predicted that by 2017 the internal combustion engine could be no more. This means that by a year ago, gasoline-powered cars should have completely disappeared from our streets.
No, dear little chicken, the sky is not falling and planet Earth will not be destroyed by man caused global warming — or is it climate change?
David Gudeman, Wichita