To the editor:
Emily Sawtelle is certainly someone the city of Haverhill can be proud of. What a delightful article to read about one of the teenagers in the city. Her parents must be very pleased with how she has begun her life. It proves that good parenting and good mentoring is priceless for a child.
Michael Veves' article on her was great to read and I sure like reading stories like the one about Ms. Sawtelle who has a great future ahead of her. We need to read more about the outstanding teenagers in the city of Haverhill.
I particularly enjoy Mr. Veves' articles, especially the ones about the damage being done to the country by the stubbornness of the religious conservatives in America. His recent articles about the clownishness of the Republican presidential candidates was excellent.
Let's hope Mr. Veves is wrong on his comments about what will happen to America if a right wing government gets control.
Thomas Drougas
Haverhill
To the editor:
David Rousseau's letter about Thanksgiving was well taken. But why must he have to keep reminding us that the reason for all of our "bounties'' has nothing to do with ourselves but that all our bounties are from "God.'' The America of Lincoln is a vastly different America from today populated by Jews, Muslims, Buddhists as well as nonbelievers. Rousseau makes no room for that, sadly. In Lincoln's day, things were much different.
Today's fundamentalist Christian movement is pervasive and it is causing distress in American politics as well as our identity as a nation. Rousseau, like so many others, forgets that there are many different religions in America which is what makes us the country we are. The constant falling back to a supreme humanlike deity who is our "beneficent father who dwelleth in the heavens'' keeps assuming a supernatural being which keeps getting Americans into so much trouble.
Might there not be a beneficent mother that "dwelleth?'' Native American tradition holds that the earth is the great mother from which all things derive. Rousseau's almost sermon-like letter is terribly maudlin and, like many of the rabid religious amongst us, he probably would feel better had he been born during the time of the Great Awakening where reason was abandoned in favor of myth.
Rousseau, naturally, uses Abraham Lincoln who assumes godlike status in our country as a vehicle to promote his real intent: God is the reason why things are the way they are. Rousseau quotes Lincoln at length and reminds us that God "hath nevertheless remembered mercy.'' Perhaps that's the mercy Rousseau means when millions were brutally slain in our civil war, family against family, brothers and sisters against each other. Quite frankly God has little to do with most of our behavior, but you'll never get the religious minded to abandon their myths and supernatural beliefs.
Rousseau's letter regarding Thanksgiving would have been much better had he not had to invoke the "God card'' yet again and again.
Richard Santos
Haverhill
