NEWS

Letter to the editor

Published February 20, 2025

In any election, statistics are important. More than seventy-seven million American voters chose to select a convicted criminal to lead our country beginning in 2025. I wonder what percentage of them anticipated that criminal would nominate wealthy people who are unqualified for national leadership to serve in his administration.

The forty-seventh president-elect has selected people for administrative positions who will not disagree with any directives he gives them, whether they are legal or harmful or not. If any of those appointees had any reasonable ethics, when nominated for a position for which they are unqualified, they would reject the nomination.

More than seventy-seven million of you voted for the forty-seventh president-elect believing that he has your best-interest in mind. All he has in mind are concepts, and those concepts are determined by what will benefit him most. Those concepts will damage the good-standing of America internationally. To represent our country in France, he has chosen a convicted criminal, someone related to his daughter, who the forty-seventh president-elect previously pardoned. To represent our country in Greece, he has selected a women who is the former girlfriend of one of his sons. Many of the people he wants to have as administrators are accused sexual predators.

I feel anxious about the future of our country, and even more so for the future of my four grandchildren. I am dismayed that a small majority of the voters in our country would select a convicted criminal to lead us. Those voters will have some hard lessons to learn.

The last time our country was led by someone nearly as terrible as the forty-seventh president-elect was in 1969. That person, Richard Nixon, was also a criminal. (His vice-president was also a criminal, who had to resign under threat of prosecution!) Nixon was re-elected in 1972. During the administration of that criminal, I was proud to display a bumper sticker on my car that read, "DON'T BLAME ME, I VOTED MCGOVERN." Our country endured and recovered from the administration of the criminal who was elected in 1968, and we will endure and recover from the criminal administration of the forty-seventh president of the U.S.

Letter to the editor

Published: March 16, 2024

On the morning of March 11, 2024, in a clip of the presumed Republican Presidential candidate, I heard him mock President Joe Biden's stuttering disability. I have heard him do that in the past and it offended me then as much it offends me today. And it also disturbs me.

My mother had a stuttering disability. When I was very young, she made the decision to work to overcome it, because she feared that her children would stutter. Her effort paid off and probably after I was eight years old or so, she very rarely stuttered.

Growing up, one of my best friends, a next-door neighbor about two years older than me, had a stutter. I remember other kids in the neighborhood mocking him when he would stutter, and I felt sorry for him. As he got older, he worked hard to overcome the disability, achieved that goal, and became very successful.

Looking back, I believe that the kids in the neighborhood who mocked my friend were immature, did not have an understanding of empathy, and were just plain nasty. A leadership role, such as the President of our United States, at a minimum requires wisdom (a result of maturity) empathy and many other positive characteristics. The presumed Republican Presidential candidate does not have any of the characteristics of a well-qualified leader. He has demonstrated that repeatedly in many ways.

When you vote, consider; do you want a leader who would publicly mock a member of your family who has a disability? Vote to put people in leadership positions who will lead in a positive direction!

Published November, 2022

We all have two strategies we can use in dealing with the dramatic effects of the climate crisis. We can employ adaptation strategies, and/or mitigation strategies. Adaptation strategies involve hardening/reinforcing our homes, businesses and service, agricultural and government facilities against severe fires, floods, storms and droughts. Adaptation is expensive and there is no net financial gain.

Mitigation strategies involve reducing the amount of greenhouse gases we add to our atmosphere, and geoengineering. This involves replacing the infrastructure that produces those gases to generate the energy that all of us demand for lighting, heating, cooling and transportation.

Employing mitigation strategies involves investing in our future, much like construction of the interstate highway system in the second half of the 20th century. We all continue to reap the benefits of that national construction project.

Some of us will plant our heads in the sand and say that those monster storms are just unusual, that we can't do anything about the weather. Those short-sighted folks will always express such opinions. With the recent release of the United Nations report "The Closing Window," all of us must begin to mitigate or adapt. Some mitigation can be small scale."

Since March 2020 we have had a solar photovoltaic system on our house. The system has generated electricity for us and we have kept a large amount of carbon dioxide from being added to our atmosphere. Our monthly electric bill has been reduced by as much as 40 percent.

Quoting from the U.N. report, released on Oct. 27, "Current policies and [Nationally Determined Contributions] NDCs are woefully insufficient to meet the temperature goal of the Paris Agreement." The IPCC report insisted that global greenhouse gas emissions would have to peak "before 2025 at the latest, and be reduced by 43 per cent by 2030.

We are about to select folks to fill leadership positions for the next two to six years. We must select folks who will choose to invest in our future and mitigate against changes in climate.

Frank Lock

Gainesville