As graduates go forth
My fellow students, faculty, and parents, here we are at another graduation. We are at the threshold of seeing our accomplishments and desires come to fruition. We all want to pursue our goals and utilize our talents to become all that we can be.
A few of you will be successful while others will become failures. Some will become victims of domestic violence. Many will have their marriages end in divorce. Others of you will have children and live to attend their funerals. Some will be victims of violent crime, yet others will become murderers. Some of you will go to prison. Some will become homeless while yet others will become millionaires. A few will even commit suicide.
Some of you will be killed in foreign wars. A few will be killed by reckless driving. Regretfully many of you will die young of diseases like cancer and AIDS, while only a very few will experience old age.
Less than 10 percent of you will find God and believe in Jesus Christ and be saved. And only one of you, by divine providence, will outlive all the rest that are here today. Look around ... and see your senior class for the last time that everyone will be gathered in one place. You will never congregate like this ever again--in this world or the next.
TOM KNIGHT
Little Rock
Scare the Dickens out
It appears that our President Donald J. Trump and Jeff Sessions are another Scrooge and Marley. Louise Henderson of Hot Springs Village hit the nail on the head. Using the Bible to justify the means of putting children in cages. This was not American law; it was Trump's zero-tolerance policy. The living first ladies in both parties don't approve of this. Laura Bush, Rosalyn Carter and Hillary Clinton said that this was inhumane. Yet Trump blames the Democrats.
Trump was wanting the wall built on the Mexican border. He wanted the Mexicans to pay for it. I wish the three spirits, not to mention the ghost of Jacob Marley, would pay him a visit to show how he is coming on and where he will wind up.
DONALD L. PUTMAN
El Dorado
Weapon is experience
Bullying in schools is not new. I am 68 and remember it daily. Those memories continued to haunt me. I was able to eventually earn a master's in counseling and worked 25 years in the Pulaski County school district. The memories I held and the experiences I shared were the weapons I used each moment and day at work.
Your editorialist noted "5-foot-nothing art teachers." So what is your alternative? Among the sadness and darkness of our world, the art teacher you so deride is more of a light than any amount of weapons you condone.
WILL FISHER
Maumelle
Devil's gone AWOL
What better environment for the devil to flourish than a meeting involving two individuals: A monster and a moron. It seems the summit between T-Rump and Kim Jung Un produced little beyond photo ops. Lots of fu-fu dust permeates the moment but fails to obscure the reality show that's center stage.
Why would two carnivores settle for the salad bar? C'mon guys, where's the beef?
The language in our new mutual agreement is the weakest of any previous pact and appears to have been drafted, almost spontaneously, by China. Note: In January 1992, during the George Herbert Walker Bush administration, the two Koreas signed a joint declaration agreeing not to "test, manufacture, produce, receive, possess, store, deploy or use nuclear weapons" or to "possess nuclear reprocessing and uranium enrichment facilities." To verify this agreement, mutual inspections were also included. That was 26 years ago.
So where's the devil today? His absence in this agreement is conspicuous and confirms without question that public relations, not international relations, was the central goal of this faux summit.
Historic? Highly doubtful. The weight of history is too ponderous for a document that is wafer-thin, sans details, to survive. It's closer to evaporating than enduring.
"When devils will the blackest sins put on/They do suggest at first with heavenly shows."--Shakespeare
HARRY HERGET
Little Rock
Breaking some glass
Rep. Steve Womack's dire predictions about the budget deficit remind me of the story of a glass replacement company's owner who spent his evenings hurling rocks through storefront windows in order to gin up business.
Womack and his fellow Republicans pooh-poohed the advice of the Office of Management and Budget and voted for a tax cut that blew a double-aught-size shotgun hole in the national budget. Now, in a road to Damascus-like moment--not six months after Womack voted on a tax cut that largely helps the wealthy--he has suddenly seen the light and decided that budget deficits are bad!
To quote the wise sage Pogo: "We have met the enemy and he is us."
CHARLIE HUGHES
Fayetteville
Editorial on 06/23/2018