Letters to the Editor, Dec. 29, 2012

By Gary DeVon • December 29, 2011 5:44 pm
Are you remaining silent?
Dear Editor,
One of the Christmas songs that is not sung much anymore, but contains a message that is very pertinent for our day is the song Good King Wenceslas. It is a song about a King that knew that to be a blessing to others was in itself a blessing, and he desired to show his Page what this looked like.
As I compare the thoughts expressed in this song with the actions of our State lands Commissioner there is this antithetical parallel between them. Good King Wenceslas watches as a man gathers firewood on a cold winter night and decides to bless this man with food, drink and wood. Good king Peter Goldmark looks out over the land and sees the people doing the things they have always done and decides to proclaim new edicts concerning those activities the people used to take for granted. Good king Goldmark says, no more use of private gravel pits, no more cutting Christmas trees and you will have to buy a permit to use the recreational areas on state lands.
In my lifetime I have seen more and more of these “gifts” of tyranny given to the people from all levels of government; one of the latest comes from the federal level. It is the National Defense Authorization Act which now marries the military and the civil police force for the purposes of Homeland Security; it also allows the federal government to detain a person who may be a potential terrorist indefinitely without trial. Now the definition of what a potential terrorist is could and may include most of the folks in Okanogan County.
Those representatives and senators whom we thought were watching our backs have betrayed us again, and what makes this sad is that nobody is talking about it, other than those who have questioned the direction government has been taking for the past 50 years. Is it only the eccentric kooks in our culture who see tyranny tiptoeing around like a bull in the china shop with AK 47 looking for that potential terrorist mouse? Or, have we come to the point Thomas Jefferson made on this subject: “All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.”
Steve Lorz
Tonasket
Why I love a small town
Dear Gary
Just wanted to share my own personal Christmas story and why I prefer living in a small town.
The night before Christmas I set the self-clean on my oven and went to bed…lesson learned don’t ever do that. Got up Christmas morning to commence dinner for 15 only to find my oven was fried…not saveable…what to do, what to do…I called Dave Kester owner of Lee Franks and bless his heart he left his own Christmas with his family to open his store for us…dinner delayed but not ruined. I love my small town for this very reason, people still care and to my mind a perfect reason to buy local.
Thank for the space,
Jeannie Ramsey
Tonasket
Get our of our house
Dear Editor,
The US Congress has continued to bargain away our future with the constant error of logic that compromise is necessary to get along with their political adversaries. Ninety percent of the incumbents are re-elected every two years. The same politicians that have caused all our problems are put back in office to continue the same mistakes over and over.
GOOOH (get out of our house) will challenge those incumbents in the primaries with citizen representatives chosen by the members of their district. This is no third party movement. We will compete against the entrenched politicians in the primaries. The few good representatives there will grow stronger with honest competition. Almost every person in America supports fair and honest competition. The politicians are the only ones who seem to disagree. They care more about their party than fairness to the process. For more information: GOOOH.COM.
Roy T Newsom
Granbury, Texas