Empathy abounds for fatherless kids
I missed four days as a long-term substitute teacher at a “high needs” middle school over the recent school year. As a 65-year-old, I was blessed beyond my humble paycheck. Many told and wrote me unbelievable and heartbreaking stories about their “home life.”
The last month, two six-graders gave me personal notes wishing I was their father. With tobacco rendering me “fatherless” at age 11, empathy abounds for fatherless kids. My most worn teaching shirt was my “Try Love” tee.
If you are retired, bored and “depressed” searching for a “purpose,” please consider teeing-off the sub-teacher application ASAP. It will be a “mission-field, battlefield, or both.”
Mike Sawyer, Denver
We have made a ‘welfare state’
We need to pay more taxes to the local, state and federal government, so that we can accommodate all the immigrants who want to come to America. We should offer them free housing, food vouchers, cell phones and free medical services along with free tuition to public or private education from the elementary school to the collegiate level.
Amnesty to all who have made it to this great and prosperous country, no more DACA issues, all are welcome to America, the land of the free, where everything is free. Except to the working taxpayers, we will be the beasts of burden to pay for this utopia. Apart from higher taxes, we will pay tuition for our children to attend college and pay for our medical insurance, for our food and our housing.
The liberal agenda has us headed in this direction as we already have third, fourth, fifth and so on generations of families on welfare. We are burning the candle at both ends and have made an abomination called the welfare state.
Jake Longoria, Mission
Demand clean budget without piggybacking repeals, changes
Congress is hashing out the next budget. Disappointingly, many legislators are once again trying to use the budget to sneak in harmful repeals of and changes to consumer protections. For example, one policy proposal added to the budget, as a so-called “rider,” would keep the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from holding companies like Wells Fargo, Equifax and predatory payday lenders accountable when they cheat us.
Why use the budget for matters unrelated to spending? Because repeals and changes to important protections can’t pass on their own. But if they’re added to the budget, which must be passed to fund our government and avoid another shutdown, members of Congress might feel the pressure to let them slide in an election year.
Hopefully, Congressman Gonzalez will stand up for a clean budget that sticks to spending, which after all is the purpose of a budget.
Manuel Villagran, Washington
