Letters for September 25, 2014

Point and counterpoint

Re “Deception and blazing sofas” (Second & Flume, by Melissa Daugherty, Sept. 18):

At the end of the column regarding students burning sofas, Melissa Daugherty writes, “But I honestly think the kids are bored. Somebody, please, give them something cool to do. You have a built-in audience.” It’s my responsibility to find something for bored students to do so they won’t burn sofas? This is an example of how ridiculous this society has become. If a student cannot think of something to do besides burning a sofa, their brain is “burned out.”

Let’s start holding people accountable for creating their own “cool things to do” instead of pleading to society to “give them something cool to do.” Stop making excuses for bad behavior and call it what it is. It’s not boredom. Get off your sofa and find something productive to do.

Kathy Wendt
Chico

I graduated from Chico State with my master’s in May. I am originally from Wisconsin but moved to California to attend Chico State. I have been living in Chico for a little over two years now. Chico is a great town; people are friendly, the weather is great, the downtown is quaint and has many great shops and restaurants. However, this town caters to families and retirees. There need to be more activities geared toward college-age individuals, and I’m not talking about [downtown bars].

Chico, while great, is also a very bizarre city. For the size of Chico and the fact that the closest big city is Sacramento, one would think there would be more job opportunities and more room for growth. I come from a town with a population of about 65,000 and it is a very big college community like Chico, but there seems to be more community involvement surrounding college-age individuals.

I’m not sure if this is the answer but I do know that if there isn’t more to do, besides hiking and bicycle riding, and there aren’t more job opportunities, kids will come here to party and after school leave this town far behind.

Libbie Dahl
Chico

Honoring late student

Re “Death of the ‘lone soldier,’” by Ken Smith, Sept. 18):

This young man had a smile that captured and lightened a room, accompanied by a voice that could bring everyone to a hush, followed by stimulated and sometimes heated discussion, all for the sake of humanity, the person, the need. It’s deeply sad and humbling to know this brilliant soul has been silenced. [He] made a profound impact on me in a few minutes’ worth of time and space on earth. God bless you, Marc Thompson, and may all our voices get a little louder, a little stronger and a lot more urgent in your honor.

Bill Mash
Chico

Administrators don’t get it

Re “Aftermath of the collapse” (Greenways, by Howard Hardee, Sept. 18):

So, the fate of the magnificent 4,000-acre Big Chico Creek Ecological Reserve is being decided by three Chico State administrators. The university has dozens of professors in its College of Natural Sciences, as well as knowledgeable retired professors, such as Paul Maslin, who could lend their expertise to forging a positive future for this beautiful land.

Instead, people with no understanding of the biological importance of the reserve have halted the wonderful program that brought over a thousand school children there every year to learn firsthand about the natural world. Not only that, but they have limited the research opportunities of the very college students they are supposed to serve. The wrong people are making the wrong decisions, and it doesn’t look good for the reserve.

If you, too, are concerned, please write to Chico State President Paul Zingg and urge him to have the reserve’s fate decided by scientists, not by career administrators.

Nancy Park
Chico

Fight for the trees

Have you seen the attack on our urban forest in front of Rite Aid on Mangrove, near Vallombrosa? This is an affront to all the efforts of all the citizens who understand and appreciate the energy savings, the pollution mitigation and the shade that those trees provided. To merely ask the property owner to replant some trees, some time is not enough!

The city has over 3,500 empty tree-planting sites.

When a contractor does a project without proper permits, he or she should have to come back, do it right and pay double the permit fees. We need a city ordinance that says you have to plant three times the number of trees you “improperly” cut down within six months and that your parking lot needs to have 50 percent shade in 10 years. Other cities have better tree protection. Why should we do less?

The citizens of Chico want better tree protection and a healthy and vibrant urban forest.

I am asking you to write the City Council; write the Bidwell Park and Playground Commission members; write a letter to the editor; attend a meeting; express some outrage; or admit that you think trees aren’t worth it.

Charles Withuhn, Chico Tree Advocates
Chico

Recollecting a coin-flip

Re “An ‘unsatisfactory’ response” (Newslines, by Howard Hardee, Sept. 18):

The debate over the seemingly elastic use of closed sessions to cloak touchy matters takes me back nearly 30 years to a commendable antithesis in Butte County. At the insistence of an administrator who refused to allow the “personnel matter” loophole to be abused on his watch, a small district school board in Oroville took the entire process of a now-forgotten hire completely public—warts and all.

The board’s repeated votes kept finishing in a tie. As news director for KORV Radio, I was clued in with a phone call at some point and showed up with my cassette recorder at the meeting, where the pluses and minuses of applicants A and B were aired out.

Finally, the board came to a decision the only way it knew how—with a coin toss that ended up making national news. I wonder how many similar indecisions before and since have been left hidden thanks to the overly used excuse phrase “personnel matter.”

Ron Flatter
New York, N.Y.

It’s not anti-Semitic

Re “Going beyond a billboard” (Guest comment, by Linda Clark-Borre, Sept. 18):

Linda Clark-Borre argues that the now-famous billboard of a wounded Palestinian girl is no substitute for a “give-and-take discussion.” I wonder, who ever said it was? The billboard is decidedly at one end of a dialogue—a dialogue the U.S. pro-Israel lobby has dominated for decades.

Clark-Borre’s references to anti-Semitism and the Holocaust insinuate that anyone who protests the Israeli obstruction of Palestinian statehood—and the illegal settlement of Israelis on Palestinian land—is probably anti-Semitic. Spare me the bullshit. The Holocaust card cannot be played ad infinitum with the expectation that “liberal guilt” will forever suppress debate.

Many dissenting Jews in the U.S. and Israel support the dissemination of “pro-Palestinian” information. Are they all anti-Semitic? Or, are they simply looking at the issues, stripped of the reverse racism that has come to justify the accountability-free zone now occupied by Israel?

Lastly, Clark-Borre quotes Rumi: “Beyond the ideas of what’s wrong and right, there is a field.” This is an attempt to bring some kind of fuzzy, mystical legitimacy to the confiscatory agenda of Israel. Any antebellum slave holder would have gladly employed this bit of Sufi “logic”—along with any neo-Nazi seeking a way to rationalize the depravity of Auschwitz.

Patrick Newman
Chico

Oh, the irony

Re “The cancer of ISIS” (Editorial, Sept. 11):

Beheading men in public is uncivilized. What is civilized is drone-bombing women and children.

Stephen T. Davis
Chico

It is interesting that they’ve used the acronym ISIS to describe “our” new enemy threat, (created or at least exacerbated by the U.S. occupation of Iraq), considering Isis was the goddess of health and love. It is also compelling that the planet, deemed “Mother” Earth, is being utterly devastated under the current “God the Father” patriarchal paradigm, just as women have been abused, subjugated and devalued under it for thousands of years, more so than any other group of people in his story.

I believe it is important to raise these concerns because under the current masculine-worldview-dominated paradigm, it is possible that neither humans nor any other species on the planet will survive into the next century. This imbalance toward the masculine, dominator worldview has brought about endless wars, famine, environmental degradation, lust for power, greed and a complete lack of foresight. It’s not about blaming men; it’s about creating a much-needed balance of both masculine and feminine ideologies.

Humanity is in dire need of a paradigm shift where feminine characteristics of cooperation, communication, empathy and altruism are valued and respected as equally as those of the masculine. It is not unreasonable to say that our futures desperately depend upon it.

Sherri Quammen
Chico

‘Throw the bum out’

Re “LaMalfa’s fanboy” and “Unfriended” (Second & Flume, by Melissa Daugherty, Sept. 4 and Sept. 11):

Brava, Melissa Daugherty, for exposing Congressman Doug LaMalfa for ripping off the government with subsidies. Every time I see one of his signs claiming “He is one of us,” I retch. The only class that he is “one of” is that of millionaire farmers and wealthy that want more from the government and want the middle class and needy to get less. If he had his way, we would have no more Social Security, Medicare or Medi-Cal. Throw the bum out.

Victor Corbett
Chico

Too many transients

Re “Blame the media” (Letters, by Alan Chamberlain, Sept. 11):

It is no longer “a few” transients sprinkled here and there. I stopped going downtown, except for the Friday Night Concerts at the City Plaza, mainly because of the transients. My husband played in the band at the City Plaza Friday night and I was amazed at the numbers of transients encircling the periphery, waiting to “reclaim their territory” after the audience, band and soundpeople packed up and left.

Don’t hate on me, I can hear a chorus of “but the homeless have rights, too.” I am not in any way unsympathetic to the homeless. I am referring to the “career tweakers,” the ones who refuse to follow the no-drugs policies of the Jesus Center. We need an anti-loitering law and need to enforce it. To do otherwise is enabling bad behavior that isn’t good for anyone, especially the person being enabled.

Until we do this, I don’t want to hear another person blame it on the “liberal City Council.” Without a law, their hands are tied. I spoke with one longtime business owner last week who is moving her business to the Chico Mall, because the transient problem has become intolerable.

Patricia Kelley
Chico

Let’s be frack-free

I was pleasantly surprised to see that on April 8 a majority of the Butte County Board Supervisors voiced support for a ban on fracking. The supervisors had concerns that capped gas wells may be used to accept waste water fluids from fracking in other counties.

Supervisor Doug Teeter said that it would not be good public policy to inject stuff into the ground without knowing what it is. Teeter also stated that he left his engineering job in the Bay Area because he was tired of working with such nasty chemicals. Supervisor Steve Lambert expressed concerns that fracking may jeopardize the integrity of our earth. What particularly struck a chord with me was the personal testimony of Supervisor Lambert, who stated that his cousin died from industry-related pollutants.

Although bipartisan agreement is rare in the current political climate, I think it is important to recognize that some harmful practices, like fracking, should be detested by all sides of the political spectrum. I hope the Board of Supervisors will do the right thing and make Butte County frack-free.

Zach Keller
Chico

Going to pot

Will Butte County go to pot at the November polls? Marijuana-grower signage is cropping up like roadside weeds. The deceptive pot calling a kettle black are “Yes on B/No on A” signs. Measure B, under the guise of protecting our property rights, is pulling the wool over your eyes. Do growers, under the pretense of needing more medical marijuana, determine quality of life in your neighborhood? Measure B equals more plants growing closer to your property lines.

Is Butte County to sustain greater environmental damage from erosion and chemicals? Watersheds and water tables in foothill communities are sucked dry by huge marijuana gardens. Trucks haul water to keep up with their thirsty demands. Bud is trafficked, untaxed, out of state while food-crop farmers of Butte County pay taxes and make meaningful contributions to their communities.

Vote yes on Measure A. It keeps an ordinance in place, allowing for medical marijuana needs. Measure A permits your say concerning your rights. Voter clarity equals yes on A, otherwise Butte County will go to pot.

Nancy Roybal
Oroville

Willing to pay a tax

As a longtime Paradise resident and now a grandmother of school-age children, I am concerned about their safety, which is why I am supporting Measure C, the temporary half-cent sales tax measure.

One of our top priorities should be to provide a safe environment for our children. Did you know that our police department has fewer officers than it did 35 years ago when the town incorporated? Yet our officers protect a larger population and responds to more calls. The town can no longer afford to provide a school resource officer to help keep our kids safe on campus. Our police struggle to effectively monitor gang and drug activity in our town. Measure C would help provide much needed fund to improve police protection in our schools and neighborhoods.

I realize voting for a sales tax increase in not popular. However, I’m willing to invest one half-cent more to help keep our children and town safe. I am voting yes on Measure C.

Pam Hartley
Paradise