In the market for a new home? Don’t miss the Open House guide in the paper Saturday and Sunday.
Undoubtedly, selecting a candidate for political office by lot would be no one’s first choice. In the case of a draw, though? It’s fast, easy and inexpensive . . . and a lousy way to decide a party nomination.
It should not be a choice at all.
By Bill Gregory
The Roanoke Times editorial board sure is funny conjuring up U.N. helicopters (“Forward, not far out, in Roanoke County,” May 5 editorial). For those not familiar, Roanoke County decided to join ICLEI in 2007. At the time, little was known about the future downside of joining ICLEI. It was just some benign, smart-growth green-chutes-to-save-the-planet talk. It appeared to be a win-win for everybody.
I suspect the entire board of supervisors (who voted unanimously to join) had no idea what U.N. Agenda 21 was. At the same time, I would bet the local chapter of the Sierra Club and the Roanoke Valley Cool Cities Coalition knew exactly what U.N. Agenda 21 was when at least one Roanoke County employee visited a Sierra Club meeting to learn about ICLEI.
Gregory is a mechanical engineer and has been a Roanoke County resident for 20 years. His is chairman the Roanoke Tea Party’s Anti-U.N. Agenda 21 committee.
The Republican nomination fight for the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors, reflections on Secretariat and the Boston bombings in Tuesday’s letters to the editor.
In her April 29 letter (“There’d be a fight for gun rights”), Jane Harmon said she resented NRA members being called “lackeys.” No one called the NRA lackeys: David A. De Wolf had written that senators doing the NRA’s bidding were lackeys.
Patriotically, A.D. Smith also wrote thanking God those same senators defended our constitutional rights (“The Constitution’s protections worked,” April 29 letter).
Right-thinking Americans know that since the National Firearms Act of 1934, socialists and stooges of the U.N. have chipped away our Second Amendment rights to the point where only 300 million privately owned firearms are in this country. Gun violence is practically nonexistent only because so many lawful people own guns.
It’s time the NRA stood up for America. Stop advocating assault weapons: They’re already legal. It should fight for the right of anyone with cash to purchase a Thompson machine gun. No ID required. The Constitution never mentions the right to keep and bear candy bars. However, unlike guns, anyone can buy candy without ID or background check. Something is wrong here.
If gun-grabbers whine about public safety, point out that well- armed citizens would take out any lunatic armed with a Thompson before, at most, 40 casualties occurred.
RAYMOND FLORY
ROANOKE
Roanoke County needs visionary leadership that will be wise enough and bold enough to guide it safely through the daunting economic challenges that lie just ahead. U.N. helicopters, it should not need saying, are not among them.
The real-world challenges hardly make the county unique in the Roanoke Valley: slow economic growth, strict new storm water rules that likely will be hugely expensive, and a critical public-private regional broadband initiative that’s on the horizon.
Unlike valley municipalities, though, the county has an election coming up, and the outcome could determine whether it takes a reasoned, fiscally sound path forward or veers off into the right-wing fringe and tea party territory, where ICLEI lies as a shadowy threat.
By John McGinness
Re: Michael Saffle’s April 28 review, “ ‘The Pirates of Penzance’ blends music, comedy”:
I take issue with Saffle’s use of the word “minions” to describe the musicians of the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra.
Minion is defined as “an obsequious follower; a sycophant” and a “doormat.”
Intentional or not, the use of the word “minions” as the sole descriptor of the RSO’s musicians is insulting.
The professional musicians of the RSO derive our incomes exclusively from performing and teaching, holding contracts in regional orchestras up and down the East Coast. Many hold tenure-track teaching positions at major universities, while others teach part time at colleges or from private studios.
For some of us, the RSO will serve as a gateway into a position with a full-time orchestra in a city like Baltimore or Chicago, while others will make a career doing exactly what we are doing in Roanoke and similar communities throughout the region.
The RSO is not a haphazard assembly of weekend warriors.
As in other serious orchestras, musicians in the RSO are selected intentionally in competitive auditions for specific vacancies.
I encourage Roanokers to take time to meet the musicians of the RSO at your next opportunity. I think you will find us to be much more than obsequious, sycophant doormats.
McGinness is a bass trombonist with the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra. He lives in Burke.
Praise for a local filmmaker and the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors elections in today’s letters to the editor.
In Roanoke, approximately 16,000 people have asthma. It’s a potentially life-threatening disease, but there are many resources to control it. The Greater Roanoke Valley Asthma and Air Quality Coalition’s goal is to reduce the morbidity and mortality due to asthma in the Roanoke region.
During Asthma Awareness Month, the coalition will offer a community education program, Close the CASE on Asthma, to teach people how to control and manage their asthma. The free, interactive workshop will be held at 6 p.m. May 20 in the Lobby Conference Room of Jefferson College of Health Sciences.
If your child has asthma, you can download our template, Asthma Action Plan, at breatheroanoke.wordpress.com/asthma. Having a plan is crucial to controlling asthma, so if you haven’t already, work with your child’s doctor to make one.
You also can monitor your local air quality with the American Lung Association’s free smartphone app, available at stateoftheair.org. High-pollution days are dangerous for asthmatics, but the good news is Roanoke’s air has less soot and smog than ever before.
For more information on Asthma Awareness Month happenings, contact me at satousman@jchs.edu. Let’s work together to control asthma in our community.
STUART TOUSMAN
Professor of Psychology
Jefferson College of Health Sciences
ROANOKE
Guns, cyclists, and the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors elections in today’s letters to the editor.
What a treat I nearly missed on Saturday morning’s Opinion page in Linda Hopkins’ “Some are born great.”
I almost skipped it, assuming it was full of undue accolades to some Yahoo celebrity du jour. Thankfully, the first word – Secretariat – caught my eye, and I knew immediately the headline was no exaggeration.
For those of us who love horses, this thoroughbred will always stir deep emotions. A week before the Kentucky Derby, my recollections of “Big Red” have emerged right on schedule, just as the sprigs of mint in my garden will reach the perfect height for juleps Saturday.
I know exactly where I was in 1973 when Secretariat won each Triple Crown race, and how I felt when he died in 1989, but Hopkins’ eloquent tribute brought it all back with startling potency.
And though I agree with her that “the ether of the Internet” cannot compare with our sensory memories, I confess that after reading her piece and drying my eyes, I wandered to the computer, Googled his 31-length victory in the Belmont Stakes, and cried some more as I watched one of the greatest athletes of all time thunder into racing immortality.
ELLEN AIKEN
ROANOKE
By Elizabeth Strother
Dr. Fuller Torrey is not a gun-rights advocate. But he shares one view with those who fought and turned back federal gun control legislation in the aftermath of the Newtown massacre of schoolchildren:
Gun control would not do much to prevent another horror such as Newtown, Conn. — or Aurora, Colo., or Tucson, Ariz. Assertive mental health treatment would.
It’s likely, Torrey argues, that those recent mass shootings, like that of six years ago at Virginia Tech, occurred because people with severe mental illnesses did not get the treatment they needed. And they did not because a failed federal policy over the last 50 years closed too many state hospital beds in favor of community-centered treatment.
Strother is an editorial writer for The Roanoke Times.
Wikimedia Commons
By Paula L. Prince and Carol Tuning
In May 2010, Gov. Bob McDonnell signed Executive Order 10 for a housing policy framework that called for a focus on addressing the needs of homeless Virginians, in addition to housing and services for those with very low incomes. The Roanoke Valley hailed this effort and began to examine local efforts to determine how they fit into the state homeless prevention goals. The primary focus of the Roanoke Valley’s communitywide effort is to prevent homelessness and support rapid re-housing for individuals and families, the second of the five state goals.
The barriers to gaining and keeping appropriate housing have not changed. The economy is improving slowly. This is reflected in the number of well-educated people who are in the shelter system, the number of people who are unemployed and the number who are employed but at a wage that does not allow them to be self-sufficient. Many of those who experience homelessness over and over have alcohol, drug and mental health problems that are very difficult to address.
Prince is chairwoman of the Blue Ridge Interagency Council on Homelessness. Tuning is chairwoman of the Blue Ridge Continuum of Care.
The Blue Ridge Marathon and the Hollins District contest for the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors in today’s letters to the editor.
“Save me from the time of trial, and deliver me from evil.” The final line in the Lord’s Prayer was on my mind at Saturday’s monthly peace vigil sponsored by Plowshare Peace Center.
It was a beautiful day to stand for an hour in the sun and reflect on the events of last week. The heightened police presence and the many marathon runners flooded my mind with sights and sounds that media repeated continuously through the week after the Boston bombings.
I was dismayed at the senseless loss of lives and limbs, and like everyone, I was relieved that the suspect was in custody and that he was alive so that more might be learned about why this young man, the same age as my own son, would collaborate in such a crime.
As I stood there holding a sign that read “Out of Middle East,” I wondered how many are connecting the dots, recognizing a connection between evil in Boston and evil in illegal American drone attacks, which, depending upon the source, have killed and maimed hundreds to thousands of civilians in Yemen and Pakistan, many women and children. I kept thinking, “Violence begets violence.”
“You reap what you sow.”
MICHAEL L. BENTLEY
SALEM
