Postal blues
In March, the Palmyra Post Office will be open from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. My job takes me on the road and I travel two hours to my job site. I am unable to pick up my mail because of our conflicting time frame.
I would like to suggest that the Palmyra office open 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. This way, most of the mail patrons would be able to get their mail every day.
Becky Wiers
Palmyra
Health care unaffordable
The Bangor Daily News has been very supportive of the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare. A number of success stories of people having health insurance because of ACA have been in feature stories and editorials. I understand that in a poor state like Maine.
What troubles me is the lack of effort by this paper and our leaders to go after health care cost. I recently had a cortisone shot for a shoulder issue and the invoice was $600. This took less than 10 minutes with a physician and an ultrasound machine.
While our president, senators and representatives are pointing figures at each other, the healthcare industry is in a feeding frenzy making money hand over fist. I’m sure the shareholders of Anthem made a lot more on their investment than I did with mine at local credit union. I’m also sure they paid less income tax on those gains.
Shouldn’t anyone be able to afford to have a simple medical procedure done without “insurance”? I’m a lifelong conservative, but think the time is here for a single-payer system. Free enterprise or not, there is something fundamentally wrong with making that much money through someone else’s pain.
Richard Ginn
Bucksport
Pies and poverty
Area Interfaith Outreach (AIO) – the board, volunteers, and the clients we serve – are immensely grateful to Historic Inns of Rockland and the restaurants and other businesses in downtown Rockland for another successful Pies on Parade. For 11 years, this event has benefited the AIO food pantry and emergency assistance, which serves all of Knox County.
The day was sold out, so we also thank the 650 good sports who came out in January weather. We thank all the participating businesses for baking all that pie and paying for the ingredients. The grand total raised from this year’s Pies day is $25,695.
Pies on Parade is about fun, about over-indulging in delicious concoctions. But it’s also about community, about stepping up to help a good cause that is doing necessary work on the community’s behalf.
In Maine, from 2010 to 2013, the number of people working full time but living in poverty grew by 11 percent. In those years, wages for the worst-paid workers declined by 8 percent. In a 2013 study, 18 percent of Knox County children live in poverty.
It’s sobering. Thank you to everyone who is paying attention and making a difference.
Sherry Cobb
President
Area Interfaith Outreach
Union
Irresponsible commentary
The erroneous and nasty responses in the online comment section to Rob Shetterly’s Feb. 11 OpEd deserve answer. The BDN states its policies respecting such commentary: No name-calling and personal attack; plus, an injunction to show respect. Readers can see for themselves the failure of those policies to have the desired effect. Structural flaws in the rules for such commentary aid and abet the consequences of ignorance and intemperance afoot in the body politic.
The permission granted by the BDN to anonymity behind impenetrable “handles” — a 21st century manifestation of the 19th and 20th’s KKK white sheets — facilitates this kind of unaccountable “noise.” We who write letters and columns are obliged to do so by proper name. Our authorship is verified and in so doing it makes what we say reachable for argument, clarification, possible correction, sometimes even praise. The Disqus structure allowing concealed identity, however, discourages, indeed, completely compromises accountability. It is exactly parallel, as Naomi Klein has written, to the structural flaws of capitalism and the “right” to profit and use the atmospheric commons without covering full cost (or penalty) which have spawned the impending climate destabilization.
Accordingly, the BDN, and indeed all newspapers allowing commentary of this sort, should require accurate and public identification and publication as to source and to prohibit, as part of the comment policy, unlimited “retorts,” or “snark,” or argumentativeness.
Hendrik D. Gideonse
Brooklin
Vote for ‘Pinny’
As the March 10 election for House District 93 approaches, I encourage Rockland and Owls Head voters to vote for Anne “Pinny” Beebe-Center. I first met Pinny years ago networking for a local volunteer group. She was generous with her time and particularly helpful.
While serving on a home energy committee Pinny chaired, I observed her inclusive leadership style: she is calm, friendly, efficient, strategic, inspiring, a successful delegator and a person who gets things done. She collaborates easily with others, a good match for her legislative plan to seek common ground on issues of importance to residents in her district.
Her impressive career path has prepared her to address the breadth of issues she will be asked to consider. As a small business owner, she has extensive experience in information technology system design, financial management, and organizational assessment. She is a creative problem-solver and has been an administrator, community activist, and served on many state, regional, and local boards and committees, primarily involving healthcare, jobs and employment, education, economic and community development, and homeless populations — important issues for today.
Not new to serving in an elected office, she was elected Knox County Commissioner in 2003 and re-elected in 2007. Running as a Clean Elections candidate, she will cast her vote in Augusta on behalf of her constituents without the influence of special interest groups or big money donors.
I encourage Rockland and Owls Head voters to cast your vote for Pinny by absentee ballot or on March 10.
Diane Smith
Cushing
What’s in a name?
The beleaguered people of Bangor should know they have allies in the residents of Beijing, in China. Beijingers are sick and tired of all those snippy, more cultured-than-thou talking heads of the American media pronouncing the name of their city with some sort of French nasal affectation. Beijing people pronounce with a low tone, Bei as in Bay Area, and Jing, with a high tone, as in Jingle Bells, not zhing or jzhing, which only makes the haute foreigners sound ridiculous.
This resident of Washington state promises to pronounce the Bangor city name correctly from now on. The people of Beijing commiserate with you.
Chester Vanek
Shoreline, Washington