Letters: Readers comment on helping kids, Christmas trees, poet Hilaire Belloc and Social Security
Helping children
Abuse, addiction, homelessness and poverty are distressing experiences that affect our city’s children every day. These are big problems that are uncomfortable and daunting. What can we do to engage these problems?
They are commonly generational and cyclical. Examples include divorce, abuse, violence and so on. Most of us have had at least one in our lives.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of these events directly correlates with life and heath outcomes. Someone with more is more likely to experience anxiety, diabetes and early death.
Is there a way to decrease the number of these instances? Yes.
Operation Breakthrough, a support organization, targets uncomfortable cycles of disparity and prevents these experiences.
It’s a school, a day care, a counseling center, an early-intervention program and, most important, a family.
Operation Breakthrough has shown us that breaking the cycle is possible and inspires our city to engage.
What happens when we engage? We have the opportunity to improve a child’s quality and length of life.
We will be uncomfortable, we will strive, we will find hope and we will transform our city and our children.
Cara Cecil, M.D.
Kansas City
O natural tree?
If one has had the opportunity to see the famous Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center or similar trees in many large cities around the world, one might wonder why they are up and decorated, with their branches free to move gracefully and naturally with the wind.
For years, it has puzzled me why the Kansas City Mayor’s Tree at Crown Center appears unnatural.
Why is it bound so tight with lights and unable to move or look like a real evergreen tree?
The tree always reminds of a purchased tree that had been placed in plastic netting for ease in transporting.
It appears the Crown Center tree is shipped intact, branches removed and then re-attached and tightly wrapped with thousands of lights.
A Christmas tree should be shaped like an evergreen and move like a tree. That would look great in the beautiful Crown Center Square.
Larry Bilotta
Kansas City
A relevant quote
I wish I had run across this long-saved quote a few weeks ago. It is from the 1912 book “The Servile State” by Hilaire Belloc:
“We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us: we laugh.
“But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond; and on these faces there is no smile.”
Jean Patterson
Fairway
Social Security
In his Nov. 30 “As I See It” guest column “Missourians are counting on Sen. Blunt to fix a broken system,” Americans for Prosperity state director Jeremy Cady tries to lead us to believe he cares about working people.
In fact, he is working for the Koch brothers, who finance what should be called “Americans for their own Prosperity.”
About most of what he wrote I couldn’t care less. However, when he called Social Security an entitlement, he lit me up.
He must not have paid into Social Security for 42 years as I have. I deserve repayment.
Congress has borrowed from the fund, which has caused the likelihood of insolvency. Repay and fix it, because we earned it.
These people in Congress get pensions and don’t care about Social Security.
Throw them all out, including Roy Blunt, who tried to insert help for the tobacco industry into the 2002 bill that created the Homeland Security Department.
You Republicans voted him in. Now watch what he does for you — not.
Tom Wolff
Overland Park
This story was originally published December 4, 2016 at 5:22 PM with the headline "Letters: Readers comment on helping kids, Christmas trees, poet Hilaire Belloc and Social Security."