LETTERS

Our slovenly language

Charlie Mink and William Jones and I are on the same wavelength. I detest what is being done to our language, a language rich with the echoes of other languages and complete enough to express any and all thoughts.

Used to be that when you heard “you guys,” you knew a Yankee was in your midst.

“You folks” and “y’all” meant you were among friends.

“No problem” meant I had been given a difficult task but was being reassured that it could be easily resolved.

And how about the word that is making me crazy: “like.” It has several meanings, but not among them is “I’m like ready” or “She’s, like, talking to me.”

Many folks’ speech is getting as sloppy as their dress, but that’s for another letter.

MARTY HENRY

Malvern

Last visit with Mother

Mother was dying. What could I do?

All I did was reminisce about the good, good days when the sun warmed the earth ever so gently, the air was clean and clear, smelling of sweet in the mountains, salty by the sea. Then I walked the sands for hours, never stepping in oil or on glass.

There were treasures galore, things that didn’t cost a penny. Mine for free; everybody’s free! Free for the looking, the taking.

Mother watched as I played in the surf and picked up jewels-pieces of abalone shells, admiring their subtle, soft rainbows gleaming in the sun. There were bits of jellyfish dashed ashore from which I could always imagine a face. People lost at sea?

The high mountain, Yosemite,up which I scrambled, into the very mouth of heaven. I beheld the bejeweled valley below dressed in apple green (crisp as a starched shirt), India green (dark, brooding), Persian green (swank, bordering blue), pine green (so deep you inhale the scent of needles gently brewing in the sun), forest and olive greens.

It was there that Mother spoke as I gazed at white slabs of polished granite, over which icy waters danced and fell. Mother intoned: “This too shall pass away.”

Mother was dying. Gone her lovely ways, her maddening demands by day, the gifts of her silent, bewitching nights. The great amount of human pollution, the ozone layer gone. The earth had become hot.

Mother was dying. Mother Earth.

CONSTANCE P. DURKIN

Fort Smith

The meaning of ‘no’

Five years ago our telephone number was turned over to the No-Call list promising us and the rest of the public that telemarketers and organizations would stop calling us.

Five years later we are still hanging up on them, disconnecting them in the middle of their messages, etc.

We were promised in good faith that the telemarketers would leave us alone. We are still harassed all day long, including weekends and holidays.

We have accidentally hung up on some family and friends we mistook for telemarketers.

As long as the politicians in charge make promises they can’t back up, or won’t, by allowing these organizations to continue calling, we will keep hanging up on them.

CHUCK REAVES

Little Rock

Good jobs benefit all

John Brummett recently criticized my focus on turning Arkansas into a Good Jobs Magnet and my “obsession” with cutting income-tax rates to help do it. I passed a bill this year that reduces income taxes by about $55 million per year by 2015, but our rates are still higher than every state that borders us.

The “Rich States, Poor States” study showed that from 2000-2009, incomes, jobs and population in the nine no-income-tax states grew faster than the nine highest-income-tax states. I’ve talked to study co-author Dr. Arthur Laffer, and he supports reducing income taxes in Arkansas to promote economic growth.

Barack Obama’s former chief economic adviser, Christina Romer, studied tax laws enacted during the past 50 years and concluded that each 1 percent increase in taxes could reduce economic output (gross domestic product) by 3 percent, sustained over several years. In other words, tax relief for workers grows the economy by triple the amount of the tax reduction.

State income-tax collections have increased 7 percent per year for decades, about 30 percent faster than Arkansas economic growth, according to a government report presented at the Tax Committee meeting I co-chaired last month. We can cut income taxes if we put the brakes on government growth.

Today, we’re 48th on the median income scale. Imagine Arkansas becoming a Good Jobs Magnet and moving up to the middle of the pack and beyond in coming years.

Why not? We deserve the quality of life that more good jobs will create.

CHARLIE COLLINS

Fayetteville

Set aside partisanship

Decisions about Syria are very difficult, but Phil Phillips doesn’t make it easier with half-truths and partisan sniping.

Phillips says that we threw Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak under the bus. Exactly how does he think the U.S. should have interfered in Egypt’s political situation?

John Kerry’s 1971 testimony before a Senate panel was not “critical of American troops in Vietnam,” but of the war itself and the moral injury to soldiers (like himself). You can read the official text online.

Also see the Winter Soldier documentary film, which shows the 1971 testimony of 30 young Vietnam veterans in a war-crime hearing. It is available on DVD or free online. Very moving-everyone should watch it. There is also a follow-up documentary, This Is Where We Take Our Stand, with veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Phillips says damage to the Assad government will benefit the Syrian rebels who are allied with al-Qaida. It will also benefit the Syrian rebels who are not allied with al-Qaida, some of them brutal criminals in their own right. Brutality breeds brutality and vengefulness.

President Barack Obama seems to want a limited, symbolic action as a warning to Assad against using prohibited weapons. But so far I’ve seen no clear-cut evidence that the Syrian government is the perpetrator.However, the world can’t just ignore a chemical massacre.

What to do? We could wait for the United Nations to conclude its investigation.

And could we, for once, leave aside the constant partisanship and the attitude that Obama is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t?

CORALIE KOONCE

Fayetteville

Editorial, Pages 83 on 09/08/2013

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