Pull back on the reins
Whoa, Nelly! The headline announcing changes to sewage management stated, "State panel OKs $61.6M loan for LR to rein in sewage." Please expand on reining techniques for the poo.
Training reining horses is a skilled profession. Using them in this reining project would likely be animal cruelty.
Perhaps reins can be used to guide writers toward an expanded vocabulary. Bit by bit, headlines might be more straightforward.
KAY HICKS
Little Rock
Discussion of slavery
Walter Williams makes a couple of errors in his recent opinion piece on American slavery. First, he fails to note that what was "peculiar" about American slavery was its scale and intensity; nowhere outside of the Caribbean was slavery such an integral part of the economy or as brutally efficient as in the antebellum United States. Southern plantations, using nothing more advanced than the cotton gin and the bullwhip, were able to produce as much and more cotton as was needed by the increasingly mechanized textile mills of the North and Britain. Furthermore, the sheer depravity of American slavery has few historic equals, and the total vulnerability of every American slave to torture, death, and assault cannot be waved away by comparisons to earlier slave systems.
Secondly, Williams uses the three-fifths clause and abolitionism as examples of how early America was not racist, which is illogical. Believing that slavery is wrong does not guarantee one is not a racist, just as believing sexual assault is wrong does not automatically mean one is not a misogynist. Williams is right to point out that there was a massive and sustained effort to end slavery in this nation, but ignores the virulent racism of many abolitionists. Look at Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, a passionate critique of slavery which unfortunately depends on two-dimensional stereotypes of enslaved persons to move white readers to action. And, just like the framers of the three-fifths compromise, Stowe and many other white abolitionists were perfectly willing to use enslaved persons as tools to hurt the South, but completely unwilling to grant African-descended persons the full rights of citizens or the social status of equals.
STEVEN LAWRENCE HULSEY
Little Rock
Win-win for Arkansas
Wow! Five years ago we were paying $3.78 per gallon for regular gas; four years ago $3.50; three years ago $3.38; two years ago $2.47 and today we are paying less than $2 in many places. What a win for the Arkansas consumer.
But, sadly, we are still driving around on the same old rough, underfunded, always behind in repair and construction roads because of insufficient funds.
Arkansas is missing a bonanza by not using some of these tremendous savings to catch up on our highway funding. If I am saving $1 to $1.50 per gallon, why wouldn't I be willing (even eager) to put 10 cents or so into fixing our highways? I am as much of a "no new taxes" conservative as anyone, but this is a no-brainer.
One solution might be to leave the current gas tax as is and in addition collect a small tax per gallon on a sliding scale based on the average price of regular gas per gallon across the state. As prices rise, the special tax would decrease until it reached a point where it would cease. When gas prices go back down, the special tax kicks in again--the lower the price, the more the special tax.
This is not only a win for Arkansas but a win-win. We get to enjoy and have more money in our pockets, but we also get to enjoy the benefits of better roads.
ED MERRICK
Benton
For motorists' safety
It would be nice to see "Trucks use right two lanes" enforced on Interstate 30 in Pulaski and Saline counties.
SHARI ROGERS
Malvern
Privilege or biology?
What is the deal with the new use of the word "privilege"? It seems a person is privileged if they have anything that another person covets.
Webster's Dictionary defines privilege as "a right, advantage, favor, or immunity specially granted to one; esp., a right held by a certain individual, group, or class, and withheld from certain others or all others." To me that definition definitely points out how wrong it was for segregation to ever have been OK, how wrong it was to withhold the right to vote from women, and how wrong it was for marriage to be withheld from gays and lesbians when it was being granted to another group. So privilege is something that is granted by another person or group to a person or group.
So when transgender people call women born women a privileged group, who was it that granted us the right to be women? You see, it is not granted by any person. We are born with a body that can, in most cases, give birth to children, bleeds monthly and is anatomically different than a man's body. That is not a privilege, it is just biology.
I have nothing against the transgender people until they start telling me what I can call parts of my own body and saying women cannot meet together as women unless they include male-to-transgender persons (men who say they are women). I don't think all transgender people are so adamantly opposed to women-only spaces, but there is a very vocal group of transgender people who have shut down women-only spaces all over this country, including in Fayetteville at the Goddess Festival this past March.
LINDA BARNES
Prairie Grove
Decimated the masses
It's obvious that profit-driven people would resent a government health-care plan and public education. However, there is one thing a country needs for survival, and that's an educated, healthy work force, which a government should provide. Don't allow desire for profit destroy our republic.
When someone tells you "let the market take care of it," run the other way. Any Econ student can tell you we haven't had traditional competition in this country for a long time. Administered pricing is du jour, meaning pricing is no longer consumer-based, but whatever the head honchos want to charge, such as with Daraprim/Shkreli.
I'm almost 80 years old and we now pay the highest prices for the poorest-quality products I've ever seen, and the rich get richer. Transfer of wealth is a two-way street, and most is going from the bottom to the top.
Jobs are not going to return to the United States, as Sen. John McCain told us when he ran for president. Companies are not going to sell their facilities and leave workers they have trained to come back, regardless of tax breaks and deregulation. There's global competition to think about, and they won't be back.
While the masses were distracted by social issues such as abortion, gay marriage and putting the Ten Commandments on public grounds, big business was decimating the middle class.
MILLIE FOREE
Bella Vista
Editorial on 07/24/2017