Creative Arts Center badly needs painting
Things and places of beauty inspire us, encourage us, lift us. Things and places that are ugly and distasteful are discouraging, dragging us down.
When I entered Chattanooga High School's brand-new building just over 60 years ago in the fall of 1963, it was a beautiful and architectural delight.
I happened to drive around my alma mater the other day. At every turn, all once-brightly painted concrete was black, blotchy, moldy — ugly. The bricks haven't changed, but the painted surfaces look as if they have not had any attention for six decades.
The students there, including an adorable great-niece of mine, witness this ugliness daily. They couldn't be inspired. They must feel their school building is neglected by Hamilton County Schools. That's discouraging.
School officials, restore the gleam of this educational gem. We read in politics of MAGA. Try this: Make Alma mater Great Again. Let Chattanooga's oldest high school and, in recent years, Center for Creative Arts, have an appropriate looking exterior.
David Cooper
Congress, not Biden, responsible for border
I was intrigued by the article in a recent TFP that showed various Republican governors making an appearance near the Southern border to complain that Biden is doing nothing to control immigration. They should instead be complaining to their own Republican colleagues in Congress who just killed a bipartisan immigration reform bill, just to placate Trump. They are blaming Biden for what their own party refuses to do.
Immigration reform is a matter of law, and therefore the responsibility of Congress. It is not dictated by the president.
There will be no peace or control at the Southern border until Republicans in Congress have the courage to tell the defunct Orange Ogre that he has no authority to dictate what they do, and then, get busy and do their jobs.
Katheryn A. Thompson
Editorial cartoon demeans Biden
The Free Press opinion page has long used demeaning caricatures of President Biden and others in its editorial cartoons, but a particularly dreadful one was used on Feb. 5, 2024. Making the point that the U.S. military is running short on its enlistment goals, a menacing-looking Biden is pointing to a potential recruit in a way reminiscent of the famous James Montgomery Flagg posters from World War I. But rather than just the "I WANT YOU" statement from Flagg's Uncle Sam, the cartoonist has Biden saying, "I WANT YOU To Be A Houthi Target." President Wilson wasn't recruiting "targets" for the Germans in 1917, nor was President Roosevelt looking for "targets" for Germans and Japanese in 1941.
Is the Free Press using this cartoon to express the notion that the United States should abrogate its world leadership role and let some other country keep the flow of shipping through the Gulf of Suez safe? Does ignoring the threat the Houthis and their Iranian supporters make to world trade put "America first"? Will it help make America great again? I don't think so.
I'm not opposed to anti-war editorials, literature or propaganda, but this cartoon reeks of irresponsibility for a country that wants to remain the world's leading power for peace.
Grady Burgner
A Black History Month question
I preface my question with a definition of white male privilege: "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn't lose voters, OK?"
On Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, mobs of supporters of then-President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol during a joint session when the Electoral College vote was to be certified. Rioting, vandalizing, looting, assaulting and injuring 140 law enforcement officers, mobs advanced.
What if ... what if the Jan. 6 insurrection had been instigated by African Americans? Picture this: Armed Black men kicking out windows, kicking in doors of the U.S. Capitol, armed Black women parading the red, black, green colors of revolution, armed BLM white men and women, front and center.
In the Oval Office, the first Black president of America, watching a Black insurrection on TV. Now fast forward to this question: How many years in prison would the first Black president and the Black insurrectionists of 2021 have already served by Black History Month 2024? How many would be dead?
Earl S. Braggs
Placing politics above all else
A not perfect but hopefully sensibly win/lose and lose/win solution to two pressing problems: A) Completely close the U.S. borders for not less than 10 years, and B) Take the monies and resources that have been, and in those 10 years would be, appropriated and divert those monies and resources to the defense of Ukraine and possibly others.
I submit this is a wise compromise that would save untold expense and would be a major step forward to reducing the onerous division within the USA.
Further, we should acknowledge almost 100% of us agree: A) The border crisis is a woeful situation and will likely remain so and, B) We cannot allow Russia to rape Ukraine and advance west through Europe (and allow other world powers to doubt our resolve on the international stage).
Will this suggested solution come to be? The probability is a strong "no" because our so-called leaders are selfishly dug in to placing politics above all else.
Claudos Spears
Young Harris, Georgia
Federal bureaucracy unelected fourth arm
By design, the legislative branch — the peoples' voice and the protector of states' rights — is/was to be the dominant arm of our federal government. How far we have strayed as Congress has been systematically disenfranchised, overrun by monarchial executive and judicial branches that create, dismiss or selectively apply their weaponized revision of law. However, the greater threat to the republic resides within the unelected fourth arm — the federal bureaucracy.
How did an unelected bureaucracy usurp the unchallengeable power to simultaneously legislate, execute and adjudicate their self-serving version of law? By controlling the very rules of democratic process that they so brazenly seek to deny others:
› Legislative: Bury massive, ambiguous, undefined "amendments" deep within legislative packages.
› Executive: Once passed by an obsequious Congress, vague language written by and for the bureaucracy becomes intrusive regulation replete with pseudo-taxation (un-Constitutional permits, licenses, fees and penalties). Such self-funding allows unrestricted autonomy.
› Judicial. For those who raise challenge, endless lawsuits — funded by the public treasury — before a weaponized court adjudicated by activist judges.
The purveyors of global socialism who have captured our government know no limits. Such a government is not a democracy nor one that can be trusted with our future.
R.G. Kirn Soddy-Daisy