Return to sender
I saw on “Good Morning Hawaii” that the lawmakers on Oahu were sending their homeless back to the mainland where they came from. I thought it’s about time, as I heard many of them were given one-way tickets to come here by various organizations up there.
It’s not fair that the taxpayers here in Hawaii have to pay for relocating them to homeless shelters and pay for their medical bills as well. They were never our problem to begin with and each state should take care of their own, not shove them to other states. We here have our own bills to pay and aging parents to care for. We really can’t afford to take on all those vagrants from the mainland.
I’m tired of free handouts to these homeless folks. It’s about time that our politicians wised up and took care of business properly.
Colleen Wallis
Kona
Follow the money
I was watching through tears as the inspiring next generation jammed public squares across the country Saturday in protest of gun violence. So brave, so articulate, so right!
Which reminded me of an article in Honolulu Civil Beat (Feb. 21) about Hawaii politicians who have accepted campaign donations from the National Rifle Association, an organization which seems to believe that school massacres are a small price to pay for the easy availability of assault rifles. And there on the list was my own state representative, Big Island Rep. Cindy Evans, $1,150.
Speaking of killing young people, she also received, in November, a $750 donation from “Altria Client Services,” a corporate arm of the Philip Morris tobacco company.
In the latest reporting period, Evans received $950 from two corporations, and was fined for failing to report certain contributions.
Her announced Democratic opponent, David Tarnas, received $16,794 from 33 individual donors in the same period.
Tarnas lost to Evans by 181 votes in the 2016 primary election. I strongly doubt that voters in House District 7 (Kohala-Kona) will make the same mistake in the August 2018 primary election.
David Polhemus
Waimea
New hope with Generation Z
Friday night’s news was very depressing. The stations didn’t even try to end on a positive note. I thought “such a life on such a planet.”
Then I woke up to the coverage of all the Generation Z kids marching for their lives all over the country, with their homemade signs like: “I should be worried about my grades not getting shot,” “Guns have more rights than my uterus,” “Protect lives not guns,” “USA not NRA,” “Fear has no place in schools.”
Suddenly I had hope again for this country because 3.6 million Millennials and Gen Z kids will graduate this year including my grandkids and another 3.6 Gen Z million next year. They are already registering or pre-registering to vote and they are going to vote to keep the military style weapons where they belong, in the military and not in the hands of young men that have been radicalized and turned into terrorists by alt-right websites.
Marian Hughes
Waimea