Letters to the editor on the riverfront, vaccines, freedoms and mail service
Riverfront
The Washington Post did a piece on Julie Bargmann with the University of Virginia and DIRT studio. She just won the Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize for her work in repurposing contaminated urban sites based on their historical significance and reusing as many materials as possible to create communal open space.
Let’s invite her to Wichita to work on the East Bank Redevelopment.
During Riverfest, it’s apparent how barren the area around Century II is when there is no special event happening. You can get a slice of pizza and watch the murky river flow by, but, for more than six square blocks, that’s about it.
It seems time for a change. Some Progress. Some Compromise. Conventions are not coming to Wichita. We are not Las Vegas or Orlando. Ship has left the port. Multicultural events, Broadway theater, the Symphony and the Opera all deserve a fitting home in Wichita.
But Century II is a wasteland designed by students of a famous architect. Let’s have the will to involve another famous — living — architect, not protégé’s, not special interest groups, not regressive-minded Wichitans.
Wichita has had the will to do great things before. Can we again?
I vote so.
Freedoms
I’m sorry Rep. Estes, if Kansas was “a place with good-natured neighbors who trust one another” as you claim in your recent opinion column (Oct. 8 Eagle) we wouldn’t need to mandate the taking of the COVID-19 shot for those who have thus far refused to do so.
When your so-called personal freedom comes face to face with my health and the health of my children and grandchildren (for which there is no vaccine presently available) it can take a backseat as far as I am concerned. If your fellow Kansans were as “good-natured” as you apparently think we all are, think again, Ron. If the government needs to mandate that certain persons get vaccinated to keep their jobs — think health care workers, nursing homes — then they can either get the vaccine or quit for the overall benefit to the rest of us. It is a free country after all.
Vaccine mandate
I retired last year from Spirit AeroSystems after 41 years there and Boeing. Not once in those 41 years was I required to take a vaccination against anything as a requirement to keep my job. Of my own volition — not force — I took the flu shot every year and have in fact have taken the COVID vaccine. Now, I understand why the vaccine is required for health care workers who deal with the sick every day and for the military. In fact, before I joined the Army in 1975 I was made aware that shots would be required. The key word being before.
That a government would force contractors — not direct federal employees — to demand their workers get a shot for a disease with a 98% survival rate is a dangerous precedent. What’s next, a chip in our wrists to do business? Because if this requirement holds, you can bet that’s next. The irony is this mandate is turning away folks who would in time take the shot; instead it’s hardening hearts. Bottom line: If the government continues to make it impossible for people to make a living they’ll have an insurrection that will make Jan. 6 look like a garden party.
Marshall and mail
Well who says government can’t work? It looks like the GOP slowdown of the US mail is working. Just today, October 12, I got a personal invitation addressed to “Residential Customer Kansas” from Sen. Roger Marshall. He asked if I would please join him for a Town Hall on October 8.
For an entire hour, noon to 1 p.m., the senator wanted me to discuss the issues that matter to me. You can only imagine my disappointment when I realized the mail was almost a week late. Way to go senator, right on top of things. Now about those issues, senator, they’ll take more than an hour. When shall we meet?