Letters to the Editor

Editor’s Note: The following letter was co-authored by three Cedar High School students. To protect student privacy, only their first name is being used for publication.

Immigrants deserve health care

Editor, the Journal,

We believe undocumented immigrants should qualify for insurance and health care because they make up 17% of our labor force and within three households they make a combined $36,000 a year (Pew Research Center). Medical care costs an average of $12,530 yearly per person (CMS.gov). This doesn’t even cover an emergency. In Washington, 36.3% of people in the Latinx community are uninsured (ASPE). The only way for an immigrant to be eligible for health insurance is if they are under 18 years old (WAHealthPlanFinder), while adults have to pay the full amount because they don’t have a Social Security card.Because immigrants make up a good portion of our population and labor force, they are important to our community. They deserve to have affordable health care and should be eligible for insurance. 

Our idea to help solve this problem is to have a resource center here in Shelton for those who don’t speak English. The reason for this is we have at least 500 students and at least 1,000 people in our community who don’t speak English, while some don’t speak Spanish either. The Guatemalan community might speak Mam and Q’anjob’al as their primary language. We have little to no resources for the Guatemalan population in our community. They need additional resources to help find health insurance and health care in Shelton.

Jordan, Tatyana and Cohen — Cedar High School students

If Hungary, why not us?

Editor, the Journal,

We are now 99.99% sure that Roe v. Wade will be history in the very near future. Let’s skip the intellectual onanism and get right down to solutions. What should the right do to sell people on the idea that a world without abortion is possible? The answer is to motivate them not to want the service. If you really want to end abortion, give them the better option. Let’s do the time-honored thing and steal the solution to the problem. Fortunately, the path is before us, and it has been illuminated by the new darling of the right.

I note that they just had a CPAC convention in Hungary. Victor Orban seems to be their new idol. Hungary offers all manner of supports for children. There are enhanced salary supports, special discounts, housing support, a special payment of 225% of a pension benefit upon birth, free or reduced cost services for children, and medical benefits. Heck, if you’re a grandmother who has worked 40 years, you can retire to look after the grandchildren. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that progressives would probably support all of this. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Florida, would have a bit of agita. His Republican Senate Campaign Platform calls for raising taxes on the working class and retired, as well as sunsetting Social Security and Medicare. No medical services for expectant mothers. The Hungarian social supports should not be a big ask. This cannot possibly be socialism. After all, their buddy Orban does it. And CPAC had no problem holding their convention in Orban’s Hungary. Mr. Orban spoke to them to thunderous applause. So, if Orban can have programs like this, and he is obviously well within the pale of conservatism, there should be no intellectual objections.

Andrew Makar, Hoodsport

It’s about yacht time

Editor, the Journal,

American tourists are notable by their self-confidence — some might call it swagger, self-righteousness, even arrogance. The source of this characteristic is due to our national pastime: yachting.

With the apparent collapse of the COVID-19 pandemic, the yacht M/V El Mistico has anchored off Hope Island to deposit a volunteer tree trimming crew, and participated in the following events: Tacoma YC’s Daffodil Festival (appropriately themed “Hope Rising”), Seattle YC’s Opening Day “The Roaring 20s” with a parade through the Montlake Cut, and most recently the South Sound Opening Day and Joint Cruise of Olympia YC and Shelton YC to Olympia’s “Island Home at 50.” We Americans are putting the lockdowns, isolation, idleness and society’s closure behind us and moving on with our lives. We’re breathing unfiltered air. We chat with our neighbors and notice their expressions.

Let’s hope this pandemic is well and truly done. Two years of isolation, idleness, fake cardboard fans sitting in even the expensive seats at football games with piped-in crowd noise and yachts moored in their slips.

We’ve now regained the

opportunity to express our self-confidence, unencumbered by this pandemic’s fear of the possibility that our neighbor is infected.

Time to celebrate! At least until the next crisis.

James Poirson, Shelton

Destruction

Editor, the Journal,

A letter in the May 18 Journal claims that without Roe v. Wade, many children will live lives of utter misery. In other words, it’d be better to kill them in the womb, like a litter of feral kittens; about 1 million kittens a year, disproportionately minority kittens, none of whom have a say in it. None of whom has the opportunity to rise above suffering. None of whom has the opportunity for worthy spiritual growth. None of whom have the opportunity to do anything except die. I mean no disrespect for the writer. But, the viewpoint seemingly expressed is one of destruction, not life.

Bruce Finlay, Shelton