LETTERS 05/03/08

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By the way, I am a professional photographer.

Kim Williams

Pleasant Hill

Famous or not, Annie Leibovitz is guilty of exploitation of a child, and Billy Ray Cyrus is guilty of neglect.

Shirley Miller

Overland Park

DUI checkpoints waste money

On our way home recently from the Music Hall, my wife and I were among the 1,670 vehicles inconvenienced by a road block and huge traffic jam when the police styled a “sobriety check.” It was at the north end of the Broadway Bridge and involved dozens of police officers and many patrol cars with flashing lights. It was quite a hullabaloo.

You may imagine our irritation when we read in The Star (4/20, Local) that all this intimidating uproar netted only 22 citations for driving under the influence and 13 other miscellaneous offenses over eight hours. I consider this to be a pitiful harvest over an eight-hour period. Thus, it appears to be a waste of taxpayer money.

Before any more is spent this way, the city’s auditor should follow these charges through the courts to their final result to determine how many citations result in actual convictions. With such information the procedure can be given a fresh and meaningful analysis to determine if it is worth doing.

Joe Williams

Kansas City

End-of-life care

Regarding the letter from Judy Walker (4/14, “No choices in hospice care), imagine this: Not only have you been diagnosed with terminal illness, but you are now lying in a hospital bed for the last two or three days of your life and you have to be moved from one bed to another (exactly the same as the first) because hospice has been called on board and they now require you use their equipment because they get paid by insurance. With no regard for the comfort of the dying patient, it has to be their way.

In this particular case, the cancer patient passed away within 48 hours.

I belong to a group called Franklin County Cancer Foundation, and we formed 10 years ago. We help with bills, provide Ensure, Depends and any kind of medical equipment you would need. We are funded only by donations, memorials and fundraisers.

We are all volunteers, so our money and comfort concerns are for the cancer patients.

Karen McIlvain

Ottawa, Kan.

Friendship forged in grief

Thank you for putting front-page news on the front page of your paper. Your article “Grief became shared healing” (4/27, A-1) deserved to be a headline.

The miracle of healing and forgiveness in the lives of a murdered daughter’s mother and the sister of her daughter’s killer is a witness to the power of God’s love.

Please continue to spotlight and print such heart-inspired encouragement whenever possible.

Beverly Evans

Olathe

Global warming not trivial

Global warming has the potential to cause millions of deaths over the next few decades, not to mention the extinction of hundreds of natural species. Hannelore Snyder Brown (4/27, letters) wrote that the use of the Iwo Jima statue on the cover of Time magazine to call attention to global warming trivializes the great sacrifices and loss of life in that battle.

It is the great-grandchildren of those American heroes who will be most affected by global warming, and it is no trivial matter.

Lynn McCanse

Kansas City

Get tough on litterbugs

To those who complain about litter, and that includes me: Picking up other people’s trash and adopting highways will have no effect on the litter problem because stupid, lazy, narcissistic, juvenile and selfish people assume that others will pick up their trash. One might as well try to bail out the water below Bagnell Dam.

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