Readers react to political bullying, the Renaissance Festival and the Kansas City Chiefs
Political bullying
I’m wondering whether the people who like Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s “tell it like it is” approach and have no time for political correctness would feel the same if his words were directed at their children on the playground or were spoken by their boss at work.
In the real world, it’s called bullying and a hostile work environment. Frankly, I am disgusted by the people endorsing the lack of civility and the double standard.
Marty Stanley
Kansas City
Renaissance fun
Robert Trussell’s jaundiced Sept. 25 article about the Kansas City Renaissance Festival, “More schtick than history at Renfest,” showed that the festival didn’t meet his obviously preconceived ideas of what it should be. Therefore, he wrote +with a negative twist about everything he did see.
The Renaissance Festival is, first and foremost, entertainment — primarily a caricature of life in the 16th century — though the costuming of the royalty, the nobility and the peasantry is among the most historically accurate of the many renaissance festivals in the country. The blacksmiths, weavers, lacers and others also portray life in the 1500s fairly accurately.
Fantasy is added with the Romani (gypsies), swashbuckling pirates, fairy-tale characters such as Cinderella and the handsome prince and others, which is enchanting, particularly for the children.
Most patrons seem to understand and enjoy the festival’s mixture of history and fantasy. It’s too bad Trussell couldn’t do the same.
M. Richard Troeh
Independence
Protesting Chiefs
The Kansas City Chiefs were so bad Monday night that my TV, in protest, wouldn’t start on Tuesday morning.
John Couture Sr.
Kansas City
Reform Legislature
Let’s face it, the Kansas Legislature is actually one body. The members of the House and Senate are essentially one party.
How about changing things and making Kansas the second state to have a unicameral legislature?
Nebraska has a unicameral legislature. There are only 49 members (senators) for a population of roughly 1.9 million. That is one elected representative for about 39,000 residents.
Kansas has 2.9 million people with 125 house members and 40 senators, or 165 legislators. This is a sizable difference, but when they all vote alike, why do we need more?
However, Nebraska has one other important difference. The Nebraska Legislature is non-partisan.
For those who do not understand this term, it means representatives don’t run as Republicans or Democrats.
The do not run on a party ticket. They all run as independents.
Let the best candidate win.
Reducing our state legislators from 165 to 75 would obviously save the state thousands and perhaps millions of dollars, which Kansas desperately needs.
The number of legislators to people also would essentially be the same as Nebraska’s, 38,700.
Charles Lusk
Leawood
Oceans’ distress
While I was lecturing to Saudi meteorologists on their new weather system’s effectiveness (at Jeddah in the 1990s), I recall making the following statement: “Our ocean life is now beginning to die at a rate faster than the ocean’s levels are rising.”
In the past 30 years, 40 percent of our ocean’s coral reefs are “bleached” and no longer habitable to marine life.
The reasons: acidification caused by CO2 absorption from the atmosphere, warming temperatures exceeding coral’s limits of life and rising levels of carbonic acid.
If anyone discovered a child dying of heatstroke in a locked car, he would go ballistic. However, few people know or care that our Earth’s liquid blanket is that locked car, growing ever less able to sustain life that is trying to exist in its confines.
Republicans and others like them around the world defend oil products and coal burning to the hilt. Why? Simply because sustenance of their massive wealth is based on control of these killer substances. They deny that there is a crisis (and are believed by the fools who vote for them), saying, “Carbon emissions are not man-made.”
Uhhh. I can’t help but believe that coal-fired power plants and most cars are controlled by humans.
John Graff
Olathe
This story was originally published September 30, 2015 at 5:50 PM with the headline "Readers react to political bullying, the Renaissance Festival and the Kansas City Chiefs."