Perpetual care or perpetual neglect?
On May 27, the Friday before Memorial Day, I bought flowers, picked up my 86-year-old mother and proceeded to the cemetery to visit and plant flowers to honor my dad, as well as our other loved ones who have passed on. Rather than a cemetery, we were greeted with an 18-inch high pasture with the gravestone barely visible.
Has Memorial Day become insignificant to the caretakers of the cemetery on Ohio Street in Bangor? Do we no longer respect or care for our deceased veterans and loved ones?
Teresa Barrows
Hampden
Support ranked-choice voting
Recently, I attended an informational meeting in Houlton about ranked-choice voting. I was pleased to find the presenters personable and well-informed.
This initiative will appear on the November ballot. I encourage everyone who plans to vote to attend a presentation on ranked-choice voting. If you can’t find one nearby, please contact the Committee for Ranked Choice Voting at rcvmaine.com. They will be happy to come to your area to explain how ranked-choice voting can be an important part of Maine’s future.
The League of Women Voters has done a substantial amount of research to recommend the approach to this subject, which would be best for Maine. I encourage readers to find out about it. I think ranked-choice voting is needed in Maine, and I hope others will agree.
Mellissa Fuller
Houlton
No gravesite should be neglected
I recently visited my grandparents’ and dad’s gravesites at the Riverside Cemetery in Orono. I was devastated at the way my loved ones’ final resting place looked. There was debris and weeds covering the front of the stone.
To me, this is so disrespectful. The people buried here were some of the founding fathers of the town. They worked, raised families, worshipped and paid their taxes, which funded the roads and schools. Many of these people served in the armed services.
My dad was a veteran of the Korean conflict, and he fought many hard battles overseas. Is this how the town pays tribute to these men and women? Cemeteries are filled with people whose loved ones either are gone or live far away.
I urge the town of Orono to take more pride and give a little more thought to how it treats these individuals. No daughter should ever have to feel the way I did when I saw the condition of those gravesites, and no site should be neglected.
Patti Dube
Lisbon
Accept national monument gift
Maine has been offered a generous gift of nearly 88,000 acres for a national monument in the Katahdin region, and I’ve heard so much spitting and spite about why we should refuse this gift, offered in good faith, for the public to enjoy.
I support designating Elliotsville Plantation Inc.’s land as a “treasured landscape.” As our woodlands come under new ownership, access isn’t guaranteed. Foresight is needed to maintain Maine’s history, heritage and future. Monument status would protect wildlife and wild land on which Mainers depend for clean, clear water and a natural, diverse forest.
Let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth.
Jayne Lello
Sebec
Bigotry against transgender students
Last week, I spent a day with 150 inspiring people working to save lives in Maine by preventing overdoses. Days before, I provided HIV tests to people struggling with homelessness, poverty and survival sex work. On Friday, my colleagues and I trained a health care center on serving the LGBTQ community and taught them horrifying statistics: 41 percent of transgender people have attempted suicide and 63 percent have suicidal ideation.
I’m exhausted. The Health Equity Alliance’s LGBTQ services team is hustling to keep LGBTQ Mainers alive, but the headlines are hustling something else: News that the governor of Maine is fighting federal civil rights protections for transgender students. Meanwhile, transgender students feel alone, unloved and feared. The public hears that violence against transgender people is justified.
When people in positions of power take the microphone to incite fear, they set a dangerous precedent. Politicians encourage public outrage over issues that are cruelly fabricated. Voters encourage officials such as Paul LePage to continue rants against marginalized people for entertainment value. Let’s not pretend words do not have consequences.
For the majority of Mainers who disagree with LePage’s attacks on transgender people, people of color, refugees and people in poverty, our reaction can’t be to throw our hands up in defeat. We have to spend time talking to our neighbors and put the choice to them. If people condone his words, lives will be lost. Hate perpetuates violence, and that is not a Maine value.
Vanessa Macoy
Director of LGBTQ services
Maine Health Equity Alliance
Augusta
Koffman for state Senate
Ted Koffman, who served eight years as a state representative from Bar Harbor, is widely known for his work on environmental and economic issues. What Mainers might not know is the work he has done to protect their rights to be informed.
As house chair of the Committee to Study Maine’s Freedom of Access Laws, from 2003-2006, Koffman provided leadership to a group of 14 Maine residents — including me — charged with examining the laws that ensure a citizen’s right to know what is going on in Maine government.
Thanks to Koffman’s ability to keep the committee focused and on task, the work it did resulted in two very significant recommendations that, I am happy to say, permanently changed the way in which Maine ensures freedom of information to its residents.
First, the committee recommended the establishment of a permanent Right to Know Advisory Committee, a version of the study committee, charged with providing oversight over the Freedom of Access law. That committee continues its important work today. Second, the committee recommended establishing a freedom of access ombudsman within the attorney general’s office. The ombudsman is a resident’s direct contact for all concerns about the use or abuse of public information in Maine government.
For these accomplishments and others, Koffman received the Maine Sunshine Award from the Maine Freedom of Information Coalition in 2008 in recognition of his leadership in furthering the cause of open government.
Koffman was a great representative, and he will be a great senator for District 7. Please support Koffman for state Senate in the June 14 Democratic primary.
Chris Spruce
Ellsworth