Letters to the Editor
Caring Community
To the Editor:
Thanks to The Fayette County Record for the endearing human interest article about J. K. Dobbins and his father written by Brenda Miles.
It reminded us of a community that can continue to care for all our citizens.
I recently experienced that caring when a truck ran a red light and struck my car. As I called 911, a gentleman parked his vehicle and came over to tell me that he had witnessed the accident. He stayed to report it to the officer who came. While the officer was taking the info from me and the person who ran the red light, a young woman drove up. She jumped out of her car and apologized, saying that she had returned to work to tell them she would be late as she had witnessed an accident and just had to go back to report.
I refuse to believe that such caring citizens are rare in our community. They are the overwhelming majority, and for that, I am thankful.
Patty Reid
La Grange
Much to Be Thankful For
To the Editor:
Thank you to all the people and groups still hosting events, helping us have extra ways to enjoy life and leaving health regulations to whom they belong, each individual individually and singularly.
Thank you to the people letting their smiles show. It’s a joy to be able to smile back, to share the silent greeting so inherent in a small town country setting.
Thank you to those who are talking about the good news instead of adding to the negative noise it seems like ‘news’ has long come to mean.
Remember, instead of the negativity, thousands of people made it safely to and from work today, thousands of stores had a great day in sales and were able to give their employees raises today, thousands of people were happy and healthy today, thousands of people were born today, thousands of people reached their goals today.
Today is a positive day. Let’s add to the good news, instead of only talking about the tiny, tiny amount of negative.
Abigail Joanna
West Point
COVID Concerns
To the Editor:
Let us all hope and pray that my beloved home town of Fayetteville where my father and my daughter and I all went to school and where I had a branch law office for many years with my sainted mother, now age 95, as my legal secretary, is not a macrocosm of all of Fayette County. While the Texas Department of State Health Services reported on October 21 that hospitalizations for Covid-19 are rising rapidly because gatherings without masks are increasing community spread, one week earlier, when dropping by a local tavern on the other side of the nearby Colorado County line to pick up the best hamburgers money can buy, 60 or more people were rubbing shoulders and drinking and talking for hours celebrating a 50 year old man’s birthday with no one but me wearing a mask. Just this past weekend, on the other side of Fayetteville, hundreds of people of all ages were packed shoulder to shoulder in the stands of a local rodeo for hours and maybe a handful of masks. In the Fayetteville antique crowd this past weekend less than a handful of masks with those in charge apparently having failed to read the fine print that our County Judge is waiting until after our Fall antique festivals before making a decision on the need to wear masks.
My home town is a town where our school district takes all kinds of precautions but after school groups of high school students, the most likely to be both asymptomatic and contagious to others, are seen walking shoulder to shoulder without masks all over town. Fayetteville is a town where three City Council Members, Pflughaupt, Pavlicek, and Marshall, voted as a block last month, when Texas suffered its biggest daily spike of corona virus in one day ever at more than 20,000, to bring back big city select baseball teams, some with a history of violating the City’s spacing rules, instead of limiting the use of our field to local teams, callously ignoring a survey of least 100 of their mostly elderly constituents requesting that all baseball activities at the City’s baseball field be suspended during the pandemic.
In response to my sign facing motorists to “Respect Life - Wear Your Mask (Matt. 25: 31-46)”, the absentee landlord of my former good neighbor across the street pointed a sign directly at my family’s front door that phonetically spelled the four letter “F” word followed by YOU & YOUR MASK and, when the tenant took it down at the gracious request of a Deputy Sheriff, that landlord terminated his month to month lease!
What type of lack of respect for law and order or inability to read and think and understand basic medical science or abject ignorance or arrogance or even hate fuels these refusals of far too many people in Fayette County to wear a mask? We should all by now know that many of us may feel no symptoms and still be contagious and that to wear a mask in public saves both lives and livelihoods and avoids having to shelter in place as confirmed by the diagram of our Fayette County Emergency Management Office in last Tuesday’s Record that illustrates a Covid-19 carrier with a mask only has a 5% probability of transmitting the virus to a healthy contact without a mask and by the fact that North Dakota has the lowest usage of masks and the highest rates of Covid-19 in the nation.
Nowhere in our Constitution or Bill of Rights are truly patriotic Americans granted the illusory ‘Freedom” to irresponsibly endanger the lives of their fellow Americans, especially the elderly or their own children and grandchildren. Those who refuse to wear a mask in public need to examine their consciences while pondering the Golden Rule and Respect for Life and the Common Good and old-fashioned Self-Responsibility and, if while doing so, they have no sense of personal shame, then all is indeed lost even after this pandemic. For without Life there can be no Freedom.
John W. Mikus
Fayetteville