Letters to editor of the Pahrump Valley Times

Reader thanks U.S. Rep. Horsford for bill support

I am a retired registered nurse, mother of five, grandmother of 12, and great-grandmother of nine. I am also an avid animal lover and rescuer and a staunch environmentalist. I care deeply about our world and what we are leaving for future generations. My family and I are longtime Pahrumpians who have just moved back home from North Las Vegas.

There is an old expression, “when you are in a rowboat, you cannot tell the other guy ‘your end of the boat is sinking.’” Folks, our boat is sinking and we need to act now to fix it.

This is why I support the 100% Clean Economy Act, a bill in Congress that would transition the U.S. to 100% clean, sustainable energy by 2050. This past summer was one of the hottest I remember. Fire seasons are worse than ever, places are flooding that never flooded before, and by 2030, much of our coastline will be underwater.

For this reason, I want to thank our representative, Steven Horsford, for co-sponsoring this act - I hope that corporate and elected leaders will continue to champion this effort and others like it.

Joann Calabrese

America is in desperate need of a hero at this time

I find myself to be in an uncomfortable position—-

If you are concerned and worried and fearful and scared of the secret right-wing conspiracy to one day abolish all of the federal government social programs (including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and college student loans) that help people—-then you have to worry about who the president will be now and in the future. If s/he agrees with these extreme conservatives, then the lower and middle-classes will be at risk and in danger.

As much as I dislike him, President Trump is really not one of them. He has no political beliefs or theory or philosophy or ideology that he believes in. But they (including the Kochs) do. Vice-President Pence does.

Pence is an extreme conservative, and, in my opinion, he is a social Darwinist. He is part of a group that is known as “The Movement Conservatives” that includes Ted Cruz and Paul Ryan. It is actually safer for the lower and middle classes to have Trump remain in office and to be the Republican nominee in 2020 than for a real social Darwinist like Pence who these extreme conservatives would love to see become president.

It bothers me that the national Democrats are not warning, informing, and educating the American people about this extreme conservative conspiracy. If a political nobody like me knows about it, surely most of them most know about it.

Yet, Trump has already ruined our country with his hateful talk, and I believe that it is probably too late for it to ever be repaired. The war between the Republicans and the Democrats will probably never soften. We are likely to always view and treat each other as “the enemy.” Our alienation and estrangement from each other will probably never lessen.

It looks like we will likely never achieve what Robert Kennedy hoped for and wished for, and what many of us today also hope for and wish for, when he said that “our goal and task must be to tame the savageness of humankind and make gentle the life of this world.”

This is all very troubling, but there is always hope.

At this point, we need a hero.

P.S. The book which does an excellent job of detailing all of the parts of this secret conservative conspiracy was written by Jane Mayer.

Its title is “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.”

This book was selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2016.

It also won the national “Helen Bernstein Book Award” for Excellence in Journalism in 2017.

Jane Mayer has either won or been a finalist for 12 awards and prizes in journalism.

To my knowledge, no one has ever been able to successfully refute anything that she states in her book.

By way of background, I am a retired college professor of Sociology, Social Work, and Psychology who is very proud to have taught at West Virginia University, Slippery Rock University, and SUNY-Brockport.

Sincerely,

Stewart B. Epstein