SPEAKOUT

Excellent choice

ANYONE WHO knows anything about city government knows the Jackson mayor and the council filled the recent alderman vacancy as ordinances require. By the way, an excellent choice was made to fill the office. Keep up the good work, mayor and council. Some people will just moan and groan about anything and everything. Lighten up, folks.

Seventh grade sex

YOUR recent story on seventh grade sex education makes some rash assumptions. It says many 12-year-old seventh graders are sexually active. That's baloney. I am willing to wager that very few 12-year-old boys are very active sexually, especially not in a family- and church-oriented communities like Cape and Jackson. In the first place, 12-year-old boys are just going through puberty. Some of them might like girls and might be thinking about girls as much as they are sports, and they might even be thinking about necking and petting. But unless they are maturing much earlier than they were in my day, I really doubt that many of them are even capable of having sexual intercourse. When do 12-year-olds have the opportunity? Where is all this sex taking place? A few 12-year-old girls, quite a few perhaps in urban areas, are getting pregnant these days, but you can bet that the fathers-to-be are older guys, not 12-year-old boys.

Smoking manager

I WAS so glad to see in the paper that somebody is complaining about the manager of a grocery store who smokes. We have even seen ashes fall into the produce. I don't know why anyone would shop there.

Short-wave Rush

HELLO, FELLOW dittoheads. If you are aggravated at KZIM continually interrupting Rush's program to air the baseball games, then scan your shortwave radio to 15.5, and you can get him loud and clear.

Trendy trees

THE TRENDY planting of Bradford pear trees is a mistake. The trees break easily in wind and ice. They do not make good street trees, as their dense foliage blocks views. Nether do they make good shade trees with their upright growth, and they attract roosting birds.

Choking lawnmower

THERE IS a man on our street who has an old green mower. It smokes so bad that it chokes my husband, and the kids cough. The neighbors said they had to close their windows when he cuts the grass. Can something be done about this?

REPLY: Have you tried talking to the man with the smoking lawnmower? Also keep in mind that there are many folks who would be glad to have neighbors who mow their lawns -- even if the lawnmower smokes a lot.

Unreal talk shows

I'VE NEVER watched talk shows very much. The ones I have watched I didn't like. Lately I've watched a few again, and I find that my first instinct was right, I still don't like them. They have the most unreal subjects and the most ungodly people on there. I think we must really be scraping bottom to call this entertainment. Can't we get something on the air that is worth watching?

Flash flooding

THE POOR people who live in the flood area at Dutchtown also have to worry about flash flooding on Hubble Creek. If you put some watershed ponds on upper Hubble Creek to collect some of this water so it wouldn't rush down all at once, not only would it help the 12 or 14 houses at Dutchtown, it also would help the poor farmers during the spring rains and the flash floods.

No OBE column?

COULD IT be? Could Peter Kinder have actually written a column about something other than Outcome Based Education? Could this be the Southeast Missourian? I don't believe it. Somebody pinch me.

Shelter for victims

I MEAN no disrespect whatsoever for the flood victims, the Red Cross, the Salvation Army or all the other wonderful organizations that are helping them. Could not the 200 people being housed in motels during and after the flood have gone with friends and relatives. The Red Cross could have paid those friends or relatives a small amount of money to help out with groceries, added utilities and transportation instead of putting out a bunch of money on hotel bills and meals out. It seems to me like we need to reorganize and get our priorities together.

No to gun laws

IN 1994, long before the NRA made comments about federal law enforcement, Lt. Harry Thomas of the Cincinnati Police Department made the following speech which was subsequently published in law enforcement journals: "Pass your gun laws. I will not beg the government for a license to continue to be a handgun owner. I will not submit to being fingerprinted or photographed or interrogated like a criminal for claiming my birthright as a free American. I will not register a single gun that I own. I will not surrender a single gun that I own. I will not apply for an arsenal license because I own more than 20 guns or more than a thousand rounds of ammunition. I will not attend mandatory safety training, nor will I submit to a test to prove that I am fit to be a gun owner, and Ms. Reno, I have this to say to you. If you send your jack-booted, baby-burning bushwhackers to confiscate my guns, pack them a lunch. It will be a damn long day. The branch Davidians were amateurs, I am a professional."

Radar on Mt. Auburn

WITH ALL of the robberies, shootings, and murders in Cape lately, I would think the police would have better things to do than to sit on Mt. Auburn Road on a weekday morning giving tickets to us tired, baggy-eyed people on their way to work trying to make an honest living. It's really a bad situation.

REPLY: Law-abiding, baggy-eyed people on their way to work don't have anything to worry about when the police are using radar guns. Observing speed limits might mean having the opportunity to go to work yet another day.

Kids are kids

THIS IS a response to a comment about Jackson High threatening to close the campus and saying that the kids, the speed laws, their music, and their trash are a sign of today's failed parenting and liberal permissiveness. I don't agree with that. That's kids being kids. And I'm tired of people blaming kids for everything.