Autism letter is hateful
I have worked more than 20 years with adults with different abilities.
Some of those adults have had autism.
In my experience everyone with autism is their own unique individual with some similarities to one another: they laugh, they feel and they love.
How is the letter that the Ontario mother wrote to her neighbor not a hate crime?
It clearly states she move from her neighborhood and that someone should euthanize Max?
If the words Jew or gay were anywhere in this letter would it then qualify?
I honestly thought that no one in Canada in 2013 would come to the conclusion that someone with different abilities should be euthanized but instead be greeted with kindness and consideration.
Again I ask how is this not a hate crime?
Tina Graham
Penticton
*****
Thanks for the wake up call
(re: Evolution just a made up story; Letters, Western News, Aug. 23)
I’d like to thank those at the Penticton Western News who make those all- important decisions about what news or opinion to print or not.
David Mercier’s letter is a perfect example of the deep wisdom this media outlet possessed when it chose to print it.
The effect this rant had on me, and I’m sure on everyone who read it was to snap me out of a growing sense of complacency that perhaps – finally – the majority of the population were starting to understand and accept that thorough scientific study and objectivity, rather than religious beliefs or any other form of bury your head in the sand reasoning (human-caused climate change is just a hoax, the earth has gone through many cycles of warming and cooling in the past) would start to change our thinking about what we need to change if we want to continue to survive on this planet.
It’s obvious that we have to be very diligent about keeping ourselves informed and educated about scientific advances and research, and only from the most reputable sources, not just the Internet.
Peer-reviewed scientific research that stands the tests of replication and time is our best chance at keeping ourselves and our Earth healthy and vibrant.
The theory of evolution, arrived at through centuries of objective study and analysis by the best inquiring minds of the human race, must certainly amount to such a massive, documented mountain of proof, that no one in their right mind would make a statement such as, “This is not science. Just because someone says it is fact, does not make it so.”
Yes, Mr. Mercier, this is science. Also, evolution isn’t someone saying it is fact.
The idea of evolution is supported by hundreds of years of science by thousands of scientists who have reviewed, duplicated and retested those studies and who all agree that it is fact.
And until some equally massive mountain of scientific proof is presented that would challenge the theory of evolution, most thinking people would have to come to the same conclusion.
But I did say thinking people.
Stuart Bish
Penticton
*****
PIB shouldn’t get money
I read with disbelief the article about the RDOS giving money to the PIB to help clean the channel. Since when does the RDOS give money to a private business to help with expenditures? I have a small business — please give me $14,000 a year!
Also $42,000 a year to clean the channel parkway? I have never seen anyone cleaning up along there. I work full time for Interior Health and I don’t make anywhere close to $43,000
Also, I have lived here all of my life and have never gone down the channel, neither have any of my children, we prefer going down the Similkameen River.
So I do not appreciate the fact that my tax dollars are going to something that I would never use and to top it off to go to a private company to boot.
It’s time that those who have been elected should be reining in the spending instead of throwing money around like drunken sailors.
Dawn Thurston
Penticton