Your Letters: Saturday

He took his parking elsewhere

For many years I have noticed the further encroachment by Bellefonte Area High School vehicles onto the public streets near the school, and as the school has grown so has the number of vehicles on the streets.

Parking has been a public nuisance, and so has trash in the yards of residents and I assume other negative issues.

Let’s assume Cerro owned that property and it had grown and assumed no responsibility to provide adequate parking. Do you think for a minute that if the employees, customers, etc. started to park on the streets that there wouldn’t be an outcry from residents, Borough Council members and the same lawyers that defended Bellefonte High overflow parking?

Be afraid — afraid of the school district, the council members, lawyers and anyone else who supported the decision to allow the parking issue to overflow, punishing the taxpaying homeowners in their front sights. The good news is that I no longer own property and no longer pay taxes to the school district. I won’t be back.

Barry Hinds Discovery Bay, Calif.

Choice of visions

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki wants to hold a plebiscite in Iraq to let his people say a simple yes or no to America’s presence there.

There are huge forces coming from here that would prevent this vote from taking place. I submit these are the same forces that have built six huge air bases in Iraq and the largest American embassy in the world.

Walt Whitman would not recognize these forces as the America of a great open-handed world friendship. In fact, these forces are familiar to Caesar, Hitler and Bonaparte as the real politik of world empire.

To be sure, Whitman speaks of the world too, but in an utterly different tone of voice.

There is a choice here of visions and each of us must make it here at the heart of our land.

John Harris State College