Letters to the Editor: March 5-6, 2022

City bus service topic nothing new

Dear editor,

At the last Shawnee City Commission meeting there was a presentation about establishing a scheduled bus service in Shawnee. This is a subject that has been bouncing around for at least 20 years.

In 2020 the city paid the firm KG Associates to perform an analysis of the feasibility of establishing such a system. I would like to direct attention to page 42 of this study. It states that the estimated first year operational cost would be $890,120 with initial capital cost of $137,860. The estimated fares generated from passengers is $68,094.

Using these numbers the taxpayers of Shawnee would subsidize the operation $822,026, which amounts to 92% of the cost. Since the capital cost is for rented buses it would be reoccurring each year.

What would all the citizens have to do without in order to subsidize the relative few who would use the service. The $ would come from the General Fund which pays for police, fire, code enforcement etc.?

Tom Claybrook

Shawnee

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'If an individual has nothing to die for, he has nothing to live for either'

Dear editor,

The following may be extreme... but it may not be: If an individual has nothing to die for, he has nothing to live for either.

It is impassioned. But the cause for which someone is willing to die doesn't warrant such a sacrifice if that cause proves itself flawed, and it seems to me that it proves itself flawed when innocent people are adversely affected. People who believe their cause justifies any and all means to achieve an end and who have little or no regard for life or peace or justice prove themselves pre-eminently self-worshippers, people who bow only to images of themselves, images enthroned in their lofty minds.

The passion derived from such deep-seated self-love--revealed by egotism, its big mouth, and its incredibly bad judgement--follows a course of tragic irony. That is, in regard to fellow human beings, that same passion contains a callous dispassion, from which people are considered only as objects useful to the glorification of that passionate self-love. Such self-love coolly abuses people to achieve its ends. And if Hitlerian or Stalinesque or Putinistic, such self-love kills people to obtain its ends. Words to describe such passionate and dispassionate egotism are many, "Darkness" being one.

And to praise such egotism, applaud it, cheer it, admire it... isn't that equally dark? Why praise the raining of destruction on peaceful streets? Why praise the death of peaceful people who want to build freedoms and sustain those freedoms for their children, just like we have and just like we do?

Ukraine has been accused of having a corrupt, Nazi-like government, so corrupt that it had to be cut out like a malignant tumor.

Oh right...guess that's why Ukrainians welcomed the Russians with applause and cheers, throwing flowers in the air as their "liberators" crossed the border. Guess that's why only a very few Ukrainian resistance fighters have tried to interdict the Russian war machine. Guess that's why the people, walking beside tanks, have offered champagne toasts to Communist tank commanders. Guess that's why the people stormed the Presidential Palace and arrested Zelenskyy, so ready they were to overthrow their government and put him and all those Nazis away... yeah right, not exactly, nope, "nyet."

At a point beyond time, the earth's Hitlers and Stalins and Putins--egotists who trample and hurt and kill--will meet their Maker.

Larry Inman

Shawnee

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'Russian troops arriving in Ukraine have been surprised to realize they were seen as invaders—not liberators'

Dear editor,

Russian military assets are steadily enveloping key metropolitan centers in Ukraine as I write. The standard explanation is that Putin fears that Ukraine’s application to join NATO will be accepted and place a hostile military threat on Russia’s border. Perhaps a better explanation is that Putin fears contiguous to Russia’s border a prosperous, Russian-speaking, free, democracy providing a standing rebuke to his repressive autocratic rule.

Russian troops arriving in Ukraine have been surprised to realize they were seen as invaders—not liberators. Putin has for years conducted a systematic campaign to repress the free press while simultaneously directing the public to State-controlled media sources offering a steady diet of propaganda.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine, has reported the “Big Lie” Russia media have spread among their own population that Ukraine is governed by “Nazis and dope addicts.” With the leader of Putin’s political party and the handful of “billionaires” supporting him and their followers receiving their information from a single source spouting the “Big Lie” propaganda, it is easy to understand the hold he has on his followers.

Some have been quoted as thinking Putin is ‘mad” or at least a bit demented. He may well be because of Lord Acton’s famous insight, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” I worked in a mental hospital three years and I saw no correspondence between power, madness, and certainly not the type of meanness Russian forces are now displaying in Ukraine. But Of course, the mean-hearted destruction rained down on the innocents in Ukraine’s cities is possible only from a corrupted mind of one with the power to wield it.

Samuel Huntington predicted WWIII would begin this way. “The cause of war [would be] intervention by the core state of one civilization [U.S.] in a dispute between the core state of another civilization [China] and a member state of that civilization [Vietnam].” [Clash of Civilizations, 1996, p316.] Substitute Russia and Ukraine and you’ve got it.

I learned in doing field research to begin by asking the “So what? Question and working back from there to the appropriate analytical methods and subjects. A simplistic application to the U.S. would be for us to avoid a leader with a history of autocratic leadership, spouting a “Big Lie,” and having followers who rely on only one source of information contradicted by independent sources. Hmmmn.

Bob Allison

Shawnee

This article originally appeared on The Shawnee News-Star: Letters to the Editor: March 5-6, 2022