LETTERS: Defending education, Endorsing executions

Defending education

Jim Taylor’s vitriolic critique about forgiveness of student loans and our dismal education system due to rampant liberalism seems to be a parroting of the Republican recent anti-education rhetoric, but is it justified?

1) How recently has Mr. Taylor set foot in a local RGV classroom or taught in a classroom upon which he is basing his assertions?

2) He rants about colleges and their many useless degrees, but does he consider the local RGV colleges that offer technical certificates, assistant/associate degrees and how it’s changed our region? Median household income in Hidalgo County was $20,000 in 1998, today $44,000; in Cameron $22,000, today $46,000.

3) As for his delusion of STEM being a conservative bastion, as a retired but active scientist I wholeheartedly disagree. I have been teaching STEM in the RGV for more than 25 years and have not found the conservatism of “Trump era values” to be true of myself and many others. My peers and I see the poverty and ignorance that has happened and is currently happening in Texas and the nation along with an increasing anti-education environment erupting today — even in our own RGV.

From firsthand experience, I do know that education in the RGV and especially in the sciences has and always will be an equitable means for success in life with certificate, associate degrees and dual enrollment studies, as well as our university higher education degrees. All of our futures depend on it.

Diane Teter

Edinburg

Endorsing executions

People interviewed on TV often wonder out loud how horrible murders at schools or on the street in broad daylight happen so frequently in America.

Aside from the fact that unstable people have easy access to battlefield weapons, it seems that reckless murders are carried out with such regularity in America because not a single killer believes he will suffer the loss of his own life for such a heinous deed.

A convicted killer gets a sentence of lifelong free rent, free board, a social life with lots of like-minded friends, a gym membership and conjugal visitation. Not such a bad life for a very bad person. A killer kills because he knows that in spite of his act of hate he will live out his natural life in some degree of comfort, no problem.

A mature understanding of human behavior says we need capital punishment to deter murder. Even many murderers understand they have forfeited their own lives and so turn the killing into a murder-suicide.

Societies all over the globe for thousands of years have enacted this form of justice, particularly for the highest degree of killings.

We have become so “liberal” that we have become stupid. Our brains and hearts and spirits are inert, dysfunctional, illiterate. We promote a policy that does the opposite of what we want it to do.

Our ancestors in America, aside from obviously unjust racial lynchings, knew how to prevent “ordinary” murder. They held public hangings and made them into educational sessions for adults and young children alike, sessions that often elicited expressions of guilt and remorse on the part of the departing soul.

Kimball Shinkoskey

Woods Cross, Utah

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