In our country, there has long been tension between individual freedom and the common good. One of the ways this has played out is Republicans’ persistent efforts to privatize the public domain, until, as Grover Norquist once famously said, government is small enough “where we can drown it in a bathtub.”
More recently we have seen Republicans in many states (including New Hampshire) pushing educational voucher systems, which use public funds to send children to private and religious schools. The net effect is the privatization of public services.
Just as our splintered news sources allow us to choose the source that affirms our beliefs and prejudices, we are heading down a slippery slope of the same thing happening with choosing schools.
Our public school system is one of the foundations of our democracy. Our youth receive a publicly funded education including transportation, accommodation for special needs, and a professionally developed and transparent curriculum.
Accountability is assured through elected school boards, state-certified teachers and annual achievement testing.
But most of all, public schools are where community is built: among children, among parents and with the wider community. School events and public events at school facilities bring us together and make community life richer.
E pluribus unum, the U.S. motto that appears on our currency, means “out of many, one.” In these contentious times, we should be seeking more ways to bring us together, not break us further into tribes.
Allan R. MacDonald
New London
In the March 22 edition of the Valley News, a story entitled “Report urges changes at WRJ VA” outlines the potential closure of the emergency department at the White River Junction VA Medical Center, citing “market demand” among other factors. This “market assessment initiative” mentions only briefly that the proposed changes would entail downgrading the emergency department to an urgent care center and diverting emergency care into the community.
As demonstrated by the ongoing pandemic, the health care systems in the Upper Valley are unlikely to readily absorb additional demands, especially for acute care services. If the emergency department is closed, this would likely lead to a concomitant decrease in inpatient admissions and procedures, jeopardizing further the viability of the White River Junction VA as a whole. Finally, and echoing concerns voiced by Sens. Shaheen, Hassan, Sanders and Leahy, this appears to me to be, above all, one step further toward the eventual goal of the privatization of Veterans Affairs services. The VA is a service to veterans and should not be required to turn a profit or consider productivity as a mission above the provision of quality health care for veterans. I would urge any veteran that values the care they receive through the VA to discuss this with their Veterans Service Officer, and for the general public to contact their representatives to urge against the adoption of the recommendations of this report.
Dax Volle
Lebanon
The writer is a staff physician at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.
Sen. Lindsay Graham loves to rant.
Four years ago, just after the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee heard Christine Blasey Ford accuse Justice Brett Kavanaugh of attempting to rape her when they were both teenagers, Sen. Graham furiously charged the Democrats on the committee with smearing Kavanaugh, who was then a nominee for the Supreme Court.
On Wednesday, March 23, the second day of hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, Graham reenacted his rant. Unfortunately, it was misdirected. It should have been aimed at his fellow Republicans on the committee, who did everything they could to smear Jackson.
They repeatedly questioned her about a prison sentence of three months that she handed down in 2013. To the charge of downloading scores of images and videos of child porn and reposting some of them on YouTube, the teenage defendant had remorsefully pleaded guilty. Yet even though Jackson’s sentences in most child porn cases “matched the recommendation by either the prosecution or the probation officer,” as Sen. Blumenthal noted, even though she based her three-month sentence on meticulous study of all aspects of the case, and even though the sentence included more than six years of supervised release, Sen. Hawley accused Judge Jackson of regularly “letting child porn offenders off the hook” and thereby “endanger[ing] our children.”
According to Andrew McCarthy, an expert on child porn cases who federally prosecuted them for nearly 20 years, Hawley’s attack on Judge Jackson is nothing but “a smear.”
It is a smear custom-made for QAnon, which once claimed that Satan-worshipping Democrats including Hillary Clinton were trafficking children out of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor. In December of 2016, this claim prompted a North Carolina man to “investigate” it by firing an AR-15 rifle into the parlor. He was sentenced to four years in prison by U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Perhaps as payback for that sentence, QAnon supporter Zak Paine has now doubled down on Hawley’s smear to claim that Judge Jackson is “an apologist for child molesters.” Not one of the most superbly qualified candidates for the Supreme Court we have ever seen … just a pedophile coddler.
But we haven’t yet heard Sen. Graham ranting about that.
James Heffernan
Hanover