Grassroots thoughts.........What do you think?????
"WAKE UP EUGENE" We are getting state and national recognition for the wrong reasons. How do you feel about the trending curve toward the top for identity theft, illegal drug use, and the crimes against person and property. The clock is ticking and the bad guys are laughing!
I have said it before that we need to get tough on crime and start REALLY supporting our criminal justice system. I am mad and you should be mad too!
Advocate for the return of the decent and law abiding and well governed Eugene and Lane County that we can have back".
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"I was born on the 4th floor of the old Sacred Heart. My parents lived here as well as my grandparents and I'm getting sick seeing what is becoming of Eugene. We are becoming SO liberal that "anything goes" and there are no consequences. We need to enforce the laws that are already on the books or otherwise, they're not worth the paper they're written on.
Concerned taxpaper"
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"There is an iron law of economics: Subsidize something and you get more of it. Our programs subsidize the homeless..."
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"One of the biggest problems we as a society have is that too many of us expect “someone else” to take care of the things we don’t want to deal with. Case in point--children. As a soccer coach, Cub Scout Leader, Boy Scout Leader, and member of a school district board-related function, I repeatedly saw parents expecting/asking/hoping that someone else help raise their children. Why? Because they are too busy at their job/personal lives/working out to take a personal interest in the rest of what goes in to raising a child. First it was day-care, then the sports team, then first grade, then high school and so on. Many were single-parent households.
Several community organizations and school programs sprouted to fill these needs. As a result, parents spent too little time raising their own children and not enough time with their kids. That left little time for teaching household rules, right and wrong, and ethics. Teachers spend huge amounts of classroom time dealing with what should be family issues. We even teach non-English speaking people how to do that—at tax-payer expense! Wonder why test scores are low? Ask a teacher. The schools have become the surrogate parent. They feed kids, they test for eye sight and hearing, they provide after school care, they discipline (but not the wrong way—of course.) Our society has gone soft. Why? Some blame it on the numerous television hours (and computer gaming) time that kids are allowed (and questionable entertainment based values.) Instead of the parent deciding what the child should watch, we expect the movie industry to label each one. And when the child misbehaves or doesn’t perform as expected, it is now “someone else’s fault.” Welcome to the no-fault society.
These young people grow up and repeat the same pattern with their own children. Or, some never grow up and live on the streets. Many of these folks fail because they can’t figure out how to fit in to society as an adult. Their parents were afraid to spank them, and as they grow up they don’t understand that they are in charge of and responsible for their own actions. If we don’t start telling our kids what is right and what is wrong, we can never expect them to turn out any different. So, part of the solution starts years before they become adults.
Even our leaders (corporate, political, community) set questionable examples. We worship sports figures, and then they get arrested. Our own President lied about having sex with a woman. Right and wrong are blurred lines these days.
Compounding the problem is the fact that today’s version of punishment means nothing. Commit a crime? No big deal; you’ll be out in no time. The prisons are full—or underfunded, so they can’t hold the recently arrested. And as a result cops are laughed at; they spend huge portions of their days tracking down offenders who fail to even show up for their hearing. Until we have laws that have teeth, and meaningful punishment, crime will continue. Watch what happens to the east. With Springfield’s new jail—which does keep prisoners locked up—their crime rate will certainly fall. The bad news is that some of these offenders will move to the west and continue their un-punished crimes in Eugene. Meanwhile the rest of us are supposed to feel guilty, pay more taxes, donate more to the food bank, and live with the consequences of a too-soft-on-crime society.
These folks have become a huge burden on our society. 38% of costs incurred by hospitals are attributable to the uninsured. So, those of us who actually budget for and pay our medical costs are taking up the slack for those who we call “unfortunate.” In reality, many of these folks choose to live the lives they do.
Continuing the trend of our anti-responsible society, we now want to regulate what type of liquor is sold in a particular area? This is to me akin to distributing “clean” syringes to drug addicts—another practice I dislike. Rather than addressing the true problem we’d rather take sensitivity classes, feel guilty that some of these parasites don’t have it as good as the rest of us, and regulate their (and our) environment. Come on folks, wake up. Regulation only costs the law abiding segment of our society and not the others. Until you get stern with the offenders, eradicate the root problem, punish the law breakers, they will continue to adapt to our lame efforts to accommodate their behaviors. If you believe Darwin, this is a form of evolution. We’re just simply training these folks to become more cunning criminals.
“No,” we should not be banning any type of liquor sales in Eugene.
Fri, 5 Mar 2010 16:38:01 EST
