Time to end marginalizing
the poor and mentally ill
The mentally ill, the homeless and those in poverty are marginalized in this state and across the country. To marginalize means to exclude or ignore or to divert the public’s attention elsewhere.
Explicitly, there are “dreams deferred,” jobs lost, vocational education needed. There are “angels” among us. Where is our compassion and our openness toward community engagement? What outlook does the homeless or those in abject poverty have?
Being marginalized in my book means being “set aside” (in the margins) also. Where does the healing begin? It begins with you and I doing our best possible to make a difference. Where is our heart? Where is our soul?
There is “social education” and more housing needed. What this community of ours really needs to affect a change is a Family Resource and Crisis Center. How else is progress for this travesty able to come about? I’ve mentioned this twice before. Thanks, and this is personal also.
Ellen Pirlo
Morgantown
It’s a gun issue, not
a mental health issue
America fought the Civil War with muskets and tamed the Old West with six shooters.
There is something wrong with the system when a person can walk into a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and kill 22 people, injure 30 more and hours later the same thing can happen in Dayton, Ohio, with 10 dead, including the shooter, and two dozen injured.
Maybe we should go back to selling six shooters and muskets for hunting and target practice and quit selling guns loaded with magazines holding 100 rounds.
Instead of talking about what to do about guns, the issue is being sidestepped with how we must address mental health issues.
It’s ridiculous to target one segment of society who have mental health issues.
Let’s just target all of society with strict background checks to purchase guns. What is so difficult to understand that guns kill no matter who pulls the trigger with a 100-round magazine. Psychiatry 101.
I would be careful with labeling who said what with red flags. Some of the president’s tweets would rank at the top of the list as coming from a dangerous person.
Steve Kopa
Weirton
The American mural
as one reader sees it
The hate, chaos, ignorance and emotion being demonstrated by thousands of Americans is an accurate picture showing the results of years of paid-for corrupt political leadership.
In the American mural I see future Americans being terminated yearly. I see debt so large the average person cannot relate to it. I see our leadership spend billions on a drug war that has resulted in more government and more drugs, trillions on a war against poverty that has resulted in more government and more poverty.
I see a government-run retirement system called Social Security that has given us more government and a ponzi scheme that is destined to fail and now an educational system that can’t tell the difference between boys and girls, but, provides some of the best babysitting and welfare services available in America.
In the real world, seats at the government table are now so expensive that large PAC’s have been legalized to collect the necessary funding to continue buying those seats. Those seats provide the power needed to control all aspect of the people’s lives and as importantly their money.
People that sit in those seats are in most cases “selected” by the political parties and presented to we the people as “candidates” qualified to represent us at the government table. We end up voting for the lesser of two evils.
It’s time to realize the New World Order is not a conspiracy theory. Governments in Europe, North America and South America are responding not to their citizens but are engaged in “political coups” designed to overthrow self-government. Removal of firearms from their citizens is a basic requirement. The illegal transfer of human beings and similar actions are efforts being coordinated worldwide and that in the long run will undermine the governments of the related countries.
As said by Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt “Nothing happens in politics that isn’t planned.” Continuing to vote for the same politician expecting different results is not a solution, it’s the problem.
Jim Hinebaugh
Maysville
