LETTERS

LITTLE ROCK — Days wane for elitists

As an 11-year employee in the medical profession, I was saddened, if not surprised, by Bradley Gitz’s derogatory statements concerning black citizens, Hispanics, single women, etc., in a recent column. I’ve worked with each of these groups daily, and I guarantee they worked harder in one week than Mitt Romney, Alexander Tytler, and Bradley Gitz have in their entire lives.

Many of them had more than one job, and I never heard one of them complain, except for me-the white guy.

Gitz seems stuck in this Gatsbyesque fantasy that many people in the Republican Party have, that monetary wealth and power gives them moral and ethical superiority over one class or group of people.

The Christian principles they used to live by have been replaced with Ayn Rand. Charity and compassion are looked upon with anger and contempt. People living in poverty are seen as dope fiends and criminals.

As for entitlements, I’m sure Gitz knows there were plenty of goodies left in Romney’s bag for the oil companies, the bankers and all the billionaires who spent everything they could to buy this election.

Unless the Republican Party evolves into an entity that includes all Americans, its days are numbered.

JOHN LANCASTER

Donaldson

Belief in what’s not so

It didn’t take long to get from the Greatest Generation to the Gimme Generation, did it?

Many are more concerned about getting their free birth-control pills than America’s economic survival or its children’s futures. If you are old enough for sex, shouldn’t you have the self-responsibility to pay for your own protection?

Take from those who work, create and produce and give to those with their hands out. This view is aided and abetted by a president who, I believe, feeds into the mindset for the purpose of exerting personal political power above any concern for the country’s future.

Most irritating is the attitude of those on the left who promote big government control and wealth redistribution. Note the illogical points in letters to this and other newspapers directed at those who signed secession petitions. The petition signers, unlike liberals, are smart enough to see what’s coming, and they’d like to get out before these nonsensical leftist policies lead to their inevitable conclusion.

The states run by and infested with left-wingers are in deep debt, mismanage their resources and believe in agenda-altered science like it was a religion, yet believe they are smarter than all of us hicks and rednecks.

Like President Ronald Reagan once said, “The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”

DON THOMPSON

El Dorado

A daughter’s strength

Local news has reported on the murder of Katherine Pearl Cleary and the sentencing of her killer. What has not been reported is the story of Katherine’s daughter, Sandra Smith.

Sandra, throughout the lengthy process of the finding and sentencing of her mother’s killer, has been a source of inspiration to all who know her. Still unsure of the complete story of what happened to her mother, she remains a woman of strength.

During this legal process, she was diagnosed with cancer and has endured chemotherapy and all it brings. Unable to eat some days, she continued to work at her shop four days per week and at an assisted living center two days a week, caring for all those she served. She has not complained, even when learning she faces radiation treatments after Christmas. She is a strong lady, an inspiration to all who know her and a lovely person. Personal illness, the violent loss of her mother and remaining uncertainties do not cause her to lose her faith in life.

She bravely continues on, and for those of us fortunate enough to know her, she is a source of inspiration for the goodness of life.

CATHERINE DUMAS

North Little Rock

More-dangerous drug

I am surprised at the relative dearth of conservative crowing at the defeat of reefer madness in the recent election. However, it is understandable in light of the legitimization of a far more dangerous drug, kochaine. Our conservative politicians seem to have snorted copious amounts of it, as evidenced by the television and print ads over the last few weeks of the political season.

Now, the candidates have done nothing wrong. That general class of drug has been legalized by no less authority than the Supreme Court, and since that action, it has been liberally doled out by pushers of both political stripes. And we thought the dispensation of a shot of hooch at the polls was disgraceful. But the aspect of this kochaine addiction which is the most puzzling is that the lauded result is the ascendancy of the Republican Party in Arkansas.

Of course, the true irony of the situation is that the kochaine was supplied by the Brothers Koch (pronounced like the soda, not the male fowl frequently paired with a bull), a pair with tenuous ties to a nearby Midwestern state who reportedly live in multimillion-dollar apartments in New York City and seem to be in our state to exploit our natural resources and our cheap labor force. Can you say carpetbagger?

Before our politicians become hopelessly hooked, they should do as we tell children to do: Just say no. If not, voters should say no to them.

ROBERT LEWIS

Fayetteville

Respect for all people

No, Bradley Gitz, it was not because people wanted free stuff that America re-elected President Barack Obama. Republicans still don’t get it.

The problem with Mitt Romney, a weak candidate among a motley assortment of equally weak and loony Republican candidates, was that no one liked him. Perhaps if he hadn’t wavered on every socioeconomic issue, and had made a stand and said what he really thought rather than pandering to whomever he was speaking to at the time, there might have been a different election outcome.

Romney blamed his loss on certain segments of the population. He depicted the 47 percent as a bunch of lazy moochers. What he forgot to mention were the “gifts” he would have given himself and other wealthy people.

Demographics have changed, and with that has been a move to a more liberal agenda. Minorities, women, homosexuals, Hispanics and young voters are not aliens from outer space. To make their votes seem insignificant is demeaning.

One can be a conservative, pro-life, anti-gay, anti-abortion, but don’t mandate that ideology on all the American population. Women do not want old white men telling us what we can do or can’t do with our bodies. Liberals want respect for all people, no matter their beliefs.

I am a 65-year-old white woman and am proud Obama is my president. A country’s greatness is judged by its compassion.

KAREN L. PORTER

Conway