Just Ask
Dear Editor, I have been encouraged recently by some positive federal response to citizen complaints. The following is primarily for those who have never communicated with their politicians. Despite having a mother who frequently contacted various authorities, it took me years to do so. It is never too late.
Following are phone numbers for New Mexico federal officials. You will be speaking with an assistant who will relay your message to the legislator. Email and office addresses are available online.
Sen. Martin Heinrich: ABQ. 505 346 6601 WA. 202 224 5521 Sen. Ben Ray Lujan ABQ. 505 230 7040 WA. 202 224 6621 Rep. Gabe Vasquez ABQ. 575 323 6390 WA. 202 225 2365 A friend who calls each of her federal representatives every single week is always told, 'keep calling.'
Far from your being a nuisance, your representatives need encouragement, like the rest of us. They want to know their constituents are informed and concerned.
Let's keep hope alive by not giving up and by speaking up!
Judith Andreica Grants
What if the Department of Education Disappears?
Dear editor, There is talk again about getting rid of the U.S. Department of Education. Some people think the federal government should not be involved in schools. But here in our own town, what does their involvement actually look like?
Many students in our area are already having a hard time with reading and math. Our schools need more help, not less. The Department of Education gives money to schools that serve low-income students and students with disabilities. That money helps pay for extra teachers, special programs, and support for students who need it most. If that funding goes away, our schools could be in real trouble.
The Department also helps protect students’ rights and collects data so schools can track how students are doing. If the Department disappears, a lot of that support could disappear too. Some plans say the work would just move to other places in the government. But others would cut programs completely— programs that our schools depend on.
If the Department is shut down, what’s the plan for our kids? Who will make sure schools still get the help they need?
Before we talk about shutting down the Department of Education, we need to think hard about what that means for kids right here in our community, so Republicans, what do you think?
Mr. Henry Meyer Grants
Brainstorm
Dear Editor, As a lifelong educator, teacher and school administrator connected to 30 schools in three states and the country of New Zealand I very much understand what a morale buster it can be year after year to be a hard-working teacher, and yet face innumerable criticisms.
But I very much admire our local newspaper, and especially the young editor who has written so clearly and courageously about the realities of public schools in this county. A place with a beautiful series of schools and even a community college again and again, not in every way, but in too many ways is at the bottom of the barrel.
And what is very clear is that business as usual over nine years has not honestly really addressed much of this discouraging data. Those wonderful and warm hearted and very polite second graders in this town are every bit as good and loved and bright as so many other second graders around the country.
That old saying about where there is a will there is a way has some truth in it. I warmly commend the sports program and arts program and band program and theater programs. But does it not seem clear that it is time for some new ideas and new approaches that very clearly have worked and worked well in many other schools and communities around the country. How about a brainstorming committee which supports and respects both the teachers and the students and has no desire to pull anyone down, but is determined to brainstorm and offer viable new approaches and alternatives. Believe me, they are out there. moaning and groaning and criticizing and pointing fingers at this person or that person won’t help at all. That is obvious. On the other hand, doing and not doing certain things over nine years and never really come close to what most places would call average results does not work either.
What do you think? Kent Ferguson
E Pluribus Unum
To the editor, I just finished a book describing W. Bush’s, our, final war against Iraq. Militarily, for the most part, a tour de force, a very lop-sided tour de force. In one of the few bungled US assaults an American Apache helicopter is shot down and its pilot Dave Williams captured. He winds up near Tikrit held with 4 other POWs before being rescued by Marines.
Of the four one is Panamanian, one Hispanic, one Filipino and one a kid from Kansas (and the Panamanian, Shoshana, a woman?). A sympathetic and resigned Iraqi guard asks Williams how all these people from different places can be in the same army without fighting each other. The Iraqi army and society, the book makes clear, was of course riven and undermined by the mutual animosity of its components: Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Baathists, Bedouins of the western desert, etc. Saddam was forced to deploy his army not so much for defense against the invader but for the protection of his regime, which dominated but did not assimilate its disparate peoples.
Ironically, the only effective opposition to the Americans was the Fedayeen, who, indeed, came from countries all over the Muslim world but were united by their fanatical religious beliefs.
Seems to me the point is that diversity can be either good or bad. If the different threads are woven into one fabric, you get, say, a red, white and blue flag that can ride a wind. If they aren’t you get a ball of lint easily blown away.
In God We Trust was not the original US motto imposed on our legal tender. That became official in the 50s dominated by the witch hunts of Joe McCarthy, one of the first to pronounce that anyone who did not succumb to the paranoid and hysterical Republican world-view were traitors, un-American. The motto of our original republic, dating from 1776 when some truths were held to be more self-evident than today, was E Pluribus Unum— from many one.
That was what made America great.
J. S. Byram Milan, NM