Letters to the Editor for Friday, September 25, 2009

A protest by folks who love the U.S.
On Sept. 12, my wife and I gathered in front of the United States Capitol with 1.2 million other Americans from all over the nation to demonstrate our dissatisfaction with the direction the current administration is taking the nation.

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We came together to exercise our constitutional right of free speech. We wanted to protest the runaway spending, the lack of transparency in governance and the passage of major spending bills without time for the Congress or the people to read them. We question the constitutionality of much that has been done. We don’t like the takeover of corporations and institutions by our government, which has led our nation to look more like the former Soviet Union than the America envisioned by the Founding Fathers who pledged to each other their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor in the Declaration of Independence. Wouldn’t it be a special day if our elected officials would take this pledge and mean it?

We are tired of being lied to by elected officials who have forgotten that they work for us. When the president gives speeches in which he talks about his health care plan and makes various claims that we the people know are untrue, including the fact that he has no health care plan, he is demeaning the presidency. This is another of the many reasons we were all in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 12.

Sadly for the liberal pundits, it had nothing to do with race and everything to do with preserving the Constitution. If we’re not careful, it won’t be long before our Constitution disappears.

In looking at the two calendars in my classroom at school last week, I could not find Constitution Day, Sept. 17, on either one of them, and, of course, none of my students who attend government schools knew about Constitution Day.
WILLIAM P. SAUNDERS Jr.
Lynchburg

Give us a blueprint
I keep hearing “I have a plan” over and over again from Republicans and Democrats alike.

Their ideas of a plan and mine are quite different. To me, a plan is like a blueprint, drawn up and tested to make sure it works.

Their plans seem to be just that, with no ideas how to implement them.

That is not a plan at all, it is only an idea.

I want to see the blueprint, have it make sense to me and have it realistic.

I also want to know how it is to be paid for without putting us deeper in debt. Too much of that has happened in the last few years.

We need accountability from the president right down to the lowest elected official. Things have gone so wrong in this country that even the least vocal Americans are speaking out.

We don’t know whom we can trust. The blinders have come off, and we don’t like what we see. We should demand that the politicians stop trying to con us and start doing the job they were elected to do. It would be a novelty, but that is what they signed on for. Step up or step down.
BARBARA HARE
Forest