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Opinion Letters Letters to the Editor for Feb. 17, 2010
Letters to the Editor for Feb. 17, 2010
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Autism: More questions than answers To the editor: If you have a child with autism, which I do, if you troll the Internet for information, which I have done countless hours searching for answers to the question “what happened?”, you may understand why the editorial (“‘Link’ cut between vaccines, autism,” Feb. 10) left me frustrated. Certainly what has happened to my son, Brody, is hardly unique in the world of autism. Brody developed normally, then right after receiving a bunch of vaccines he became ill. He lost his words, eye contact and in a matter of months began exhibiting the repetitive behaviors and social withdrawal that typify autism. There may be thousands of roads to autism, involving genes and external factors. So while it is good news to have one more thing to check off the list of possible triggers, this “debunking,” as you call it, raises more questions than answers. No denying vaccines are one of the most important advances in history, but there is a risk to every medicine no matter how small a percentage of people who are susceptible. To suggest research money on one possible cause for this mysterious disability has been spent irresponsibly is, well, irresponsible. This is a very emotional debate and more research was and is needed. While other parents of children with autism are familiar and comforting to us, we are still separate entities simply because the autism spectrum disorder looks vastly different on everyone. There is one thing we can all agree on: We are a growing population. Ten years ago approximately 1 in 10,000 children were diagnosed, today approximately 1 in 150. Something is dreadfully wrong. I hope researchers discover the magic bullet we all so desperately crave. While accepting autism I know I will never stop learning how best to support my son. But after 10 years my priorities have shifted from “what if” to “what is.” Do not feel sorry for us parents — sometimes the hardest part of autism is dealing with people who don’t seem to understand why my handsome son repeats lines from movies to express emotion: “silence you fools!” fits many situations, which leads me to my last point. We could all learn more from him than he will ever learn from any of us. Amy Powell Baker City
To the editor: Just a few comments and facts regarding Mr. Smith’s recent letter. First of all, from the most recent numbers I could find from the IRS, which are for 2007, the top 1 percent of federal income taxpayers, which had taxable adjusted gross income of $410,000 or more, paid 40.4 percent of all income taxes. The top 25 percent of taxpayers, which includes those with $66,500 taxable AGI, paid 86.6 percent of all federal income taxes. The top 50 percent of taxpayers, which includes everyone with a taxable AGI of $33,000 or more, paid 97.1 percent of all income taxes. The bottom 50 percent of payers, those with taxable AGI of less than $33,000, paid only 2.9 percent of all income taxes. So it would seem those dirty old capitalists are paying their share of income taxes. Secondly, it should be realized that those dirty old capitalists in the good old U.S.A. include most small businesses that have for many years been the catalyst for job creation, and that includes our farmers and ranchers who provide the full shelves of just about anything you would want from the supermarket. It’s been this dirty old capitalist system that has made this relatively young country the world leader in most everything. What should worry us are things such as what happened recently n Oregon. When voters can pass an onerous tax increase on 3 percent of our citizens with a clear conscience, I believe it is cause for concern. And what made it worse was that the proponents touted it was fine because it did not affect the other 97 percent of us. Richard Erwin Baker City
To the editor: In response to the editorial dated Feb. 12, I find it hard to believe we are still re-hashing the events of June 9, 2009. The council fired the city manager and in case you didn’t like that decision you got to vote to recall two of them. Well, we all know how that turned out. We chose to keep all council members by an overwhelming majority. Why is it so hard to move past this? Steve Bogart should stay neutral on this topic because now it looks like he’s being influenced by those councilors who didn’t agree with the firing. Oregon law was not broken June 9, but Resolution 3407 has been violated at almost every council meeting since then. Why don’t we talk about that? Gail Duman Baker City
To the editor: I have a complaint about the City Council. They need to let more stuff come here to Baker or Baker is going to be a ghost town. What kind of future is Baker going to have for people growing up here, everyone is going to move away. All the City Council lets come in is restaurants and little clothes stores, that isn’t going to help our city at all. We need things like mills and bigger stores like Wal Mart to come in. Baker has nothing for people to get work. The city council needs to realize this problem. Jeremy Hetterley Haines |
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