Help refugees face problems, not flee them
As we honor Martin Luther King Jr. this week, let’s remind ourselves MLK didn’t tell African-Americans to run to Canada to solve their problems. He told them to pull together, organize and demand change in their own country. And he left us a far better nation. It wasn’t easy. People risked their lives, and some died. But that’s what it took.
Americans have a long, proud history of political struggle, fighting each other for good reasons, and that’s who we are and how we formed this nation. We put ourselves through a painful bloody Civil War, a violent labor movement, a human rights movement, a women’s movement, an anti-poverty movement and an anti-war movement. We know that if you’re passive or indifferent and let the problems fester, they only get worse.
Most of the problems facing our world will be solved by true patriots, such as MLK and Nelson Mandela, who work for change in their native land. Wealthy Western nations cannot possibly rescue everyone who wants to escape the problems he or she was born into. And in the big picture, our rescue fantasies are neither helpful nor realistic.
Let’s be more generous with foreign aid, helping people solve the problems in their own countries and honoring the citizen activists who organize the political movements that create real progress. Here are the champions.
Jonette Christian
Holden
Democratic spin machine
Vocal liberal Democrats with a vendetta against the governor like to put a spin on things and draw attention away from the real issues and to themselves for political gain, as they did over the governor’s recent comments at a Bridgton town hall meeting.
Isn’t the real issue here the deaths and lives affected by the inflow of drugs to this state?
I think it’s time some of these people take a step back and look at the bigger picture and see how they really appear instead of trying to make a large issue out of a single word error.
Randy Curtis
Thomaston
Americans need economic security
Although I agree with much of what Matthew Gagnon writes, he is seriously out of touch with reality if he thinks it is authenticity of movies and football games that are paramount to our lives and seeds for our anti-politician movement, as he wrote in his Jan. 13 BDN column.
He can stop wasting gallons of ink trying to figure out what Americans want. It is not what we want. It is what we need.
We need economic security. Nearly 7 million of us work part time but want to work full time, which is nearly double what it was in 2007. Forty percent of us live paycheck to paycheck. Even with improved health care insurance, we are just one major medical problem from bankruptcy. A college education holds little promise when it comes with outrageous debt and poor job prospects. Increasingly, we see no secure future as our current leaders have presided over the destruction of the middle class for decades, producing economic inequality, without addressing the problem.
In my opinion, Gov. Paul LePage rode this dissent to the office of governor.
What have we got to lose by electing an outsider to the president’s office? It should be a wake up call for Gagnon and politicians.
Richard Abbott
Hancock
Maine ratepayers foot energy efficiency bill
There is a general misconception about Efficiency Maine Trust that was obvious in the Jan. 11 BDN editorial about the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative funds being used to reduce industrial electric rates. The funds Efficiency Maine has to spend will probably approach $100 million per year soon. Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative is a part of that but not most of it.
Nearly all the money comes from the ratepayers of Maine through charges in their electric bills and, to a smaller extent, their natural gas bills. It isn’t free or a gift from the federal government. We all pay for it right here. Even if the bill the editorial opposed passes, Efficiency Maine will still have a huge sum to provide incentives, tens of millions of dollars.
The Efficiency Maine Trust is well run and does what it does at very modest cost and overhead. It collects the money and then decides what they think would be good to do and then gives money to users who choose to do those things. Those that choose to participate pay a good part of the project cost and get an incentive from the trust. It may save the rest of us money but that is somewhat debatable. It certainly saves whomever gets the incentives money. The rest of get the satisfaction of paying for it at least.
Donald Lewis
Secretary of the board
Efficiency Maine Trust
Brewer