Letters: KC readers discuss vaccine objectors, book bans and Chiefs replacing Mahomes
Nothing new
A recent letter writer claimed that back in the day, parents never objected to vaccinations. I beg to differ.
When my siblings and I were children in the 1950s and ’60s, our parents had us vaccinated against nothing. To opine, as the letter writer did, that they didn’t love us may or may not be true. But, their stated reason stemmed from our grandmother.
As the story I was told went, she had been diagnosed with something serious enough to require an operation. She rejected the procedure over the objection of my grandfather, who insisted she would die (she outlived him by 20 years), along with the overall medical establishment, and she turned to herbal and natural remedies instead.
As a result, we kids never saw a doctor until we were adults. And, when the forms came home requesting our vaccination details, my mother simply falsified them. I, being an obedient child, grew nervous turning them in and longed to be just like the other kids. But, it wasn’t meant to be.
The anti-vaccination crowd of today is vocal and organized, and the media take note. But to say that parents of a similar persuasion didn’t exist in the past is just incorrect.
- Betsy Lubis, Overland Park
Can’t stop ideas
As the issue of how history is taught in our public schools intensifies, we learn of efforts to restrict curricula and to limit the information available to students through the classroom and in the school libraries. There are suggestions locally to ban and or burn books.
I offer into the discussion the following text from a speech given by Kansas’ most famous Republican:
“Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed.” – President Dwight Eisenhower, in a commencement speech at Dartmouth, June 14, 1953
- Robert Hagedorn, Lee’s Summit
Fairer maps
Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcraft’s recent comments on redistricting underscore the need for significant election reform. (Nov. 13, 1A, “Missouri secretary of state wants to increase GOP seats in map”)
With the immense amount of public voter data we have at our disposal, it’s easy for states to gerrymander the current single-member districts. It’s possible for a party that gets barely 60% of the statewide vote to win nearly all the seats available. This is what’s happening across the country in both red and blue states.
If we were to adopt the election method described in H.R. 3863, the Fair Representation Act, it would reduce the opportunity and incentive to gerrymander. This act would create multimember districts for congressional elections and use a form of ranked-choice voting to elect candidates proportionally. With fewer votes wasted, it makes it more difficult for a partisan mapmaker to pack and crack voters, and leads to more voters having representatives that they personally voted for.
This form of election is not new. In fact, it’s been used in other countries for decades. I hope more voters will realize there’s a better way to hold elections and demand this change. Otherwise, we’ll be having these same arguments in 2031.
- Richard Pund, Overland Park
In the know
I am so disappointed in those who advocated and petitioned that Patrick Mahomes be replaced as the Chiefs’ quarterback before his amazing performance Sunday night. You Monday morning quarterbacks have never been in an arena of competition or challenged, but only criticize others.
There is a poem by an unknown poet: “Bullfight critics lined in a row/Fill the arena full/But, only one is there who knows/And that is he who fights the bull.”
So you fickle fans, I hope you are one day “in the arena” in some situation, and then you may understand what it means to work hard and not measure up to others’ expectations, to know the feeling of being challenged. Go back to your water cooler, because no one with intelligence is interested in your unaccountability about every subject and your unfaithfulness to others.
- William Paul Service, Overland Park