Speak Out 1/19/14

Grateful to volunteers

I just read the article about the Cape Senior Center and mobile meals. My parents are homebound and receive the meals. They truly appreciate the meals and all those who make it happen. We are very thankful for all those involved, especially the volunteers. May the Lord bless and keep you all.

Required reading

I thought the piece in Tuesday's Opinion page by Ari Fleischer on "How to fight income inequality" was excellent. I would hope high-school students might be assigned that to read. But it could help our country in the years to come.

Schools and snow

I don't understand why the kids were out of school for so long. A day after the so-called "big snow" we were supposed to have and didn't get, I went out driving and it was not that bad. Of course, I had a Buick, which is a little heavy, but still the buses could have run. I came from up north around the town of Peoria. On the day it snowed, 7, 8, 10 inches even sometimes, boy did it get cold up there. The schools were open the next day. Now sometimes the kids in the country, they couldn't get out. But they were allowed to make it up. They still had school.

Taxes

I liked the quote Debra Mitchell Braxton put in, saying she hopes that people will remember that we have not always been as one. Yes, I pay my personal property taxes, and some people don't.

Leaves

We live in a neighborhood by Hopper Road. And we were told by the city to rake our leaves to the curb, and they would come by with a giant vacuum cleaner and suck them up and remove our leaves. Well, the leaves started falling in October. And my neighbors started raking their leaves to the curb. And now it's middle of January and the leaves are still there. The giant vacuum cleaner has not been out to see us. There's a lesson to be learned here: Do not trust your government to do things for you that you can do for yourself. Next year, get a mulching blade on your law mower and mow the grass an extra few times. The leaves will just get ground up, turn into mulch and be good for your yard. But don't trust the government.

Insurance cost

My sister works at a nursing home and her insurance payment is going from $30 pay period to $400. How can that be good? Oh, I guess when no one's working that's good for the economy, because you can stay at home and watch your kids. Thank you. I guess that's also creating jobs, as Obama would put it.

Preschool

The way I feel about Head Start is, I'm all for government-funded preschool. Because it's not fair. Just because you're poor, you get Head Start. My children were at a disadvantage because of that. I was middle class. I had to scrape to get money to send my kids to preschool. Not all my children had preschool. It was only until we got into a better income range that we had preschool for our last child. And our last child did so much better in school, because he had the advantage of preschool where my other two did not have that advantage. And it always made me upset that just because you're poor, you have a right to more education than if you're middle class. That just didn't seem right to me.