Thoughts and Prayers
Dear Editor
When will America do something about massive gun shootings?
While I was working at Ford Motor Company, the Rouge, one of the Company doctors was harassing the nurses in demeaning, sometimes sexual, ways. Nurses were left in tears, took refuge in psychological medical leaves. Despite high minded and very public policies and procedures that should have protected workers from abusive managers, the Company did nothing. The best I could do as UAW Chairman of the nurses’ unit was to get the nurses transferred to another medical.
I told the nurses that the Company would do nothing until the doctor tormented someone the Company cared about.
After years of bad behavior, the doc harassed a family member of a Ford manager. Gone immediately, dismissed overnight. We ask ourselves when will the government do something about mass killings? When someone the people in power care about die, when the victims are not just Wal Mart shoppers, or second graders, or night clubbers, maybe we will see action. Until that time comes, until the government uses its far-reaching powers to protect us, to protect our children, we can be comforted with our elected officials’ “thoughts & prayers.”
Bonnie Beltramo
Alienated
(In response to Body snatchers, a letter by Bonnie Beltramo, The Citizen, July 27, page 6.)
Dear Editor,
I felt sorry for Bonnie Beltramo when I read her letter pondering how her friends and relatives have been “transformed into Trump supporters, transformed into people we do not recognize.”
Unable to come up with a logical explanation for why her friends and relatives might actually support our President, Bonnie jokes that they must have been replaced by aliens.
Instead of treating your dear friends and family like aliens, Bonnie, I might recommend you talk to them. The “smart friend” you “had to block from Facebook” — maybe unblock her, or him. Your “sensible, moderate” cousin might have good reasons for supporting President Trump (jobs, the economy, foreign policy, etc.)
Maybe instead of viewing your Trump-supporting friends and family as aliens from another planet, you might listen to what they have to say.
Maybe you will discover that even if you don’t share their political views, they are still the sensible and loving people you knew.
Perhaps you will even discover that it is the media you’ve been consuming for the past few years that has alienated you from them, not the other way around.
I wish you well.
John A. Joslin
Cart Return
Dear Editor
After unloading my groceries at Bueche’s on Friday morning, I was wheeling my basket back into the store. The lady in the car next to mine seemed in a hurry and asked if I was taking my basket back. I told her I was, and offered to take hers, too. She gratefully accepted. On the way back, a man pushing two baskets, asked if mine were going back and offered to take them. I gratefully accepted.
On the way out of the parking lot, we were all waiting in line, while the road crew worked on improving Oakwood. During the five-minute wait, I had plenty of time to ponder why government—village, township, county, state—and,WASHINGTON,D.C.—can’t act the same way. We had four baskets that needed to go back. None of us cared what religion we were, nobody asked our political party—we just knew the baskets needed to go back—and we got them there!
Veronica Stevenson
You just don’t get it
(In response to Body snatchers, a letter by Bonnie Beltramo, The Citizen, July 27, page 6)
Dear editor,
I resent being called a “pod” but then again Trump supporters are being called all kinds of names these days. If people you know are changing it’s because they have a fuller understanding of what’s happening around us and you just don’t get it.
Lisa Ksiazek