LETTERS

LITTLE ROCK — Physical responsibility

Yay for Monday-fitness news abounds: Get more sleep, no, wait-less sleep; run-no, walk; eat this-no, wait. That’s bad, this is good . . . eek!

I’m not overweight, but I’m not muscular either. I can walk four miles at a go, and it takes me an hour. I don’t do it every day, but I try to get 10,000 steps on my Fitbit (shameless plug) as often as possible. People live to be 105, having never stepped inside a gym. People die at 42, running a race.

When I received troubling news from my doctor a couple of years ago, I freaked. Blood tests, sleepless nights and frantic calls to my prayer partners followed. It all came to nothing (praise God), except for the realization that I am mortal. And God has a call on my life. And I am responsible to maintain this body in keeping with that call. I know, you don’t believe as I do. Fine. But leaving God out of it, you have a responsibility to your family, community, society as a whole to do what you are able to do to not be a burden, to run whatever race life has given you.

So, for what it’s worth, I try to eat less and move more, stand more than I sit, walk more than I stand, park far from store entrances, use stairs. I’ve given up most alcoholic beverages because they interfere with my sleep. I don’t drink coffee after noon. Every little thing we can do to tip the scales in our favor should be done.

I love Mondays. New start, new chances. We have no idea which race God will choose for us to run this week. We need to be ready. Get up and get moving.

EMILY JOYCE

Sherwood

Not fault of care law

A letter recently published on the Voices page exemplified a major misunderstanding of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, referred to by the writer as Obamacare.

The writer was upset by a fee generated by a visit to a physician whose practice is apparently owned by a local hospital. When confronted by the patient regarding the facility fee of $13.23, the bookkeeper reportedly said, apparently because it was easier to assign blame elsewhere, that it was due to the new health-care law.

I’m a doctor, and there is nothing in the new law requiring this. Small practices, and now even large groups, have been under increasing pressure for the last 10 years or so to consolidate and merge with each other and with hospitals, solely to remain competitive and financially stable. This was going on long before “Obamacare,” and will continue for many years to come.

It has nothing to do with changes in national health-care law.

STEVE A. JONES

El Dorado

Entitled to get benefit

Why do discussions of entitlements never include federal government employees’ retirement and health benefits, particularly those of elected officials, particularly those of the Congress and their staffs? I know of no employer in the private sector where retirement and other benefits seen to accumulate as quickly.

I paid into Social Security the maximum amount for 41 years; certainly, I’m entitled to my benefit.

CHARLES TAUNTON

Fayetteville

At last, hope for Hogs

Well, it looks like the Razorbacks finally have a coach who can compete with Alabama for a national title.

I’m sure he will be recruiting some big, powerful backs like Alabama has every year and have a well-balanced defense that can finally stop another team’s offense.

It does no good to score a lot of points if you can’t stop anyone. Great hire. Go Hogs.

VIC JOHNSON

Mount Ida

C’mon, feel the noise

Beware of a health malady that occurs this time of year. It is called acoustical poison ivy. It is relentlessly irritating to the psyche, the portal of entry is through the ears, and it runs its course in about four to six weeks.

It is caused by leaf blowers.

LINDA H. NEYLAND

Little Rock

Riding a straw horse

Recently, Bradley Gitz gave us his take on the marijuana initiative and the Barack Obama/Mitt Romney contest. He came up short on both matters. Re pot, he stated that its fans are harmless and likely to “nod off to Pink Floyd.” Anyone who’s ever seen and/ or heard Pink Floyd is not likely to nod off, but to open their eyes a little wider, unlike those who nod in agreement to Dr. Gitz’s political musings.

He viewed with alarm the news that Romney got no votes in 59 inner-city Philadelphia precincts, but failed to mention that in 2008, John McCain got no votes in 57 precincts. It sounds like even more voters found nothing to like about the GOP’s 2012 candidate. Even more disturbing is the declaration that MSNBC is “perhaps the closest thing we have to an American Izvestia,” a statement no doubt meant to conjure up “Communist news organ.” And let’s not ignore Gitz’s comparing an apple with an orange: Izvestia was considered a “newspaper of record” in the old Soviet Union, so a more appropriate analogy would have been to mock the New York Times, considered the U.S. newspaper of record.

But here’s the most intriguing part: Gitz said MSNBC, in the last week of the campaign, had 51 percent of its stories about Obama on the positive side, with none negative. What were those other 49 percent? Neutral? For Romney, 68 percent were negative, with none positive. Gitz neglected to give us the comparative percentages on Fox News. I wonder why.

And so Dr. Gitz rode his MSNBC straw horse onto the Voices page, dismounted, and beat that poor nag into submission.

JACK W. HILL

Bismarck

On the winning side

Having just read Bradley Gitz’s recent column titled “Romney nails it,” I first thought that Gitz was joining the increasing crowd who are claiming that Mitt Romney put another nail in the Republican coffin.

But, as is his usual tone, Gitz was spouting off about “those who don’t work much, don’t pay many taxes,”claiming them to have been bought off by President Barack Obama. Gitz calls this “precisely targeted gifts” to encourage “dependence, free-riding, a growing sense of aggrieved entitlement.”

Using the popular talking-heads cliché, these are dog whistles for the far right.

Nowhere in his column did he complain about the large corporations who paid nearly no taxes on billions of dollars of income like GE, or the billions of dollars of tax subsidies to oil companies like Exxon-Mobil.

But then, why should he bite the hand that feeds him?

Gitz fails to admit that the president was re-elected. In both elections, the president won both the electoral and the popular vote.

Gitz also fails to admit that all the voter-suppression bills, passed by red-state legislatures, seem only to have inspired more voters to take action and vote.

If you don’t like the president, my letter probably won’t change your mind.

But I do like being on the side of the winner.

VICTOR JACUZZI

Little Rock