Letters: Readers discuss their hopes, dreams and celebration for 2018 and beyond
Maximize 2018
The best the new year brings is hope. Here are some elastic resolutions that can carry you throughout the year:
▪ Engage with people more than pixels.
▪ Resolve to spend more time looking into someone’s eyes when you communicate with them.
▪ Make a promise of presence.
▪ Take your soul seriously. You get only one soul. Don’t squander it in things unworthy of its majesty.
▪ Increase your kindness. Behave generously even when you don’t feel like it. Your life will be improved by simply being more kind.
▪ Choose someone to forgive. The more you forgive, the less the world can injure you; forgiveness is a soft shield for your soul.
▪ In forgiving, include yourself. Have expectations of yourself, but don’t enforce them with a hammer.
You have not wasted a single day of your future. This new year is your chance to live purposefully. Take the opportunity to improve the world in the coming year.
Michael R. Shirley
Leawood
Children in need
The new year will be celebrated by many anticipating even more prosperity and promise. Sadly, others once more will experience hopelessness — the darkest desperation that haunts the poor.
There is no guarantee which emotion you will feel at any moment. One will shiver from the chilled air and the foreboding hopelessness of his miserable despair. The other will stoke a roasting fire as he toasts with his expensive champagne and fancy hors d’oeuvres. Still another will ration the portions of his discounted supply so that each one of his hungry children will have at least a bit more for the holiday — a special provision for such an occasion.
One is funded by the tax dollars of the men and women of this country who voted those elected elite into their prestigious positions. Elected to protect the rights of the men and women who pay their salaries. Elected to protect your rights. We hear of these officials shaming our nation with self-indulgences at the expense of us, the taxpayers.
No child should suffer from despair. Still, every moment they pay, while our well-compensated officials shame us so mercilessly.
Julie Whiting
Greenwood, Mo.
Pick a party
Time to celebrate, and I don’t know which of the winners’ parties I’d rather attend. There is the extravaganza for American oligarchs (hedge fund managers, real estate moguls) at Club 21, or President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, or the KGB’s oligarchs with the other kleptocrats at their vodka-drenched bacchanalia in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin.
Since I won’t be invited to any of them, I plan on joining some of my buds for a Bud at the Legion, there to ponder what we may now expect for the continuity of our Social Security and Medicare and further threats to our environment, society and, of course, our democracy.
Happy New Year.
Dean O. Allen
Kansas City
True morality
I am hoping for a moral revolt by voters in 2018.
Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate have been united in their intent to deny Americans health care, chop any existing safety net to pieces and make the rich richer at others’ expense. Their priorities are anti-Christian, anti-life and immoral.
I call upon conservatives who consider themselves Christian to see this reality and vote for change. You need to understand that just being anti-abortion does not make you moral.
People need to stop voting for politicians who want to deny people health care, food and housing — essentials for living life. Let’s truly be pro-life, not just pro-birth.
David Pack
Lenexa
Raising funds
I accept the frustration of a Dec. 28 letter writer that we are choosing to fix Kansas City International Airport but have not yet come up with a way to pay for a replacement for the Buck O’Neil Bridge. (8A)
It is not really a choice and not a question of better prioritizing, but of having an adequate and appropriate funding source.
We have a clearly defined, responsive and adequate funding mechanism for the airport (user and landing fees collected and paid by the airlines), but not for our roads, highways and bridges. Traditionally, these have been mostly paid for with gasoline taxes and vehicle licenses, assisted by federal funds.
Missourians have elected and re-elected legislators who are determined not to raise taxes for anything, no matter how necessary or how directly related to their use. For much too long federal funding has also been throttled.
If we want safe highways and bridges, we must elect representatives who will be committed to raising the funds (in other words, taxes) required to pay for them.
Charles Downing
Roeland Park
This story was originally published December 31, 2017 at 8:30 PM with the headline "Letters: Readers discuss their hopes, dreams and celebration for 2018 and beyond."