Failing our kids
I'd like to thank Amanda Claire Curcio for writing an excellent article titled Juvie: Lost Time. It starts on the front page of Sunday's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and continues to cover all of page 10A. I sincerely hope many people in Arkansas will read this and realize these are our children, and we are failing them miserably.
A recent article in the Democrat-Gazette relates how the strongest pepper spray available is used on kids in youth lockups. They are sprayed in the face and forced to let the spray stay on them. Things like this have been going on for years.
I know there has been recent legislation passed that is supposed to help keep children from being sent to youth lockups. We should all be appreciative of this; I certainly am. I think many of these kids have special needs caused by home, school, community, etc. It would help if every person getting a college degree had one course dealing with special-needs kids. Perhaps they would find it easier to stay in school and have more community support. A caring person, a stable home, a good church--so many things could save many of these kids.
If they are sent to a juvenile detention center, it should be a place where there's a caring staff and real help available for the kids, along with help for their parents.
It's really up to you, the people of Arkansas. Do you care about our kids? If you do, a lot of things are going to have to change. You need to get busy, and you should have done it a long time ago. However, it's not too late.
BONNIE COOK
Fayetteville
Giving thanks
Brenda Looper recently penned a piece about the boy from Florida who delivered doughnuts to police officers as a thank-you. I invite readers to extend thanks, as I try to do, in a personal way.
When I see a law enforcement officer who is not occupied, fire personnel who are in the grocery or a discount store, a MEMS medical provider, and other public servants, I do my best to simply say, "Thank you for your service." Want to light up the face of another while getting a warm feeling inside yourself? That will do it.
SAM HIGHSMITH
Little Rock
Big government
So, our supposedly conservative governor wants to provide "scholarships" to 500 low-income children in Pulaski County to send them to any private school of their choice. Let's call this what it is, the big hand of government getting even bigger. Private education has always angered the left. Now they think they've found a way to get a toehold into our private schools? You think they'll stop at just 500 children? You think the ever-increasing amount of "scholarship" funding won't come with the suffocating strings of leftist indoctrination attached to it? How long before they "mandate" all children be accepted to any school they want?
Where does it stop? Leave our children alone, Gov. Hutchinson.
BENJAMIN HEMINGWAY
Little Rock
Defying predictions
Will earth become uninhabitable by 2030? Do we really have just 12 years left for survival? There is at least one person with access to a national audience who says this is true. Is it some learned and distinguished scientist with reams of hard data? No. It's a 29-year-old former bartender who was elected to Congress on a meager majority in her heavily Democratic district's primary election. Her reference was to an October 2018 UN report which made no such conclusion.
Andrea Dutton, a paleoclimate researcher at the University of Florida told Axios, ""For some reason the media latched onto the 12 years (2030), presumably because they thought that it helped to get across the message of how quickly we are approaching this and hence how urgently we need action. Unfortunately, this has led to a complete mischaracterization of what the report said."
Gavin Schmidt, who leads NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, told the same publication: "All the time-limited frames are BS." He further said "The thing to push back against is the implicit framing that there is some magic global mean temperature or total emissions that separate 'fine' from 'catastrophic'. There just isn't."
AP reported the same explanation last week. AP also reported that a senior U.N. environmental official said entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed in 11 years. That report was published June 11, 1989.
It seems if there truly is an effect on climate from humans (and cows) no one in the scientific community seems to know how to predict what to do and when to do it but a lot of politicians and journalists surely do. Right or wrong.
MICHAEL SANDERS
Little Rock
Eye doctors
What's all this talk about the Legislature allowing optometrists to perform eye surgeries similar to what ophthalmologists do? Someone needs to tell those legislators that ophthalmologists don't need the extra business those optometrists will send to the emergency room.
Gene Reid
Little Rock
Editorial on 03/23/2019