Letters: Heartwarming response to food drive; A theory for military bases

Heartwarming response to food drive

My fellow Altrusans and I just want to give a great big thank you to all of the good people who donated to our Altrusa Patriotic Picnic food drive on Saturday, July 11. The heartwarming generosity of the people of Centre County is truly stupendous – we were able to donate 22 boxes of food (420 pounds!) to the State College food bank, and another 22 boxes (as well as a Subaru Outback packed to the brim with dog and cat food and other pet supplies) to FaithCentre. Shoppers also chipped in over $600 in cash donations — wow! Thanks also to Weis Markets in State College and Bellefonte who were nice enough to let us collect food items in front of their stores, and even made announcements and let us post flyers in the aisles. It just goes to show that Centre County is full of greathearted people who are willing to pitch in and help those who need a hand, and we couldn’t have had the success we did without you. All of you that contributed are good eggs and every one of you is a peach!

A theory for Southern military bases

I am not against the renaming of military bases. It is a great irony that officers who rebelled against the Union are memorialized in the names of U.S. military installations. However, it seems obvious to me why that irony was employed. Have you ever noticed the enormous number of military bases in the South? There are lots and lots of them, and their economic impact is staggering. In the Southern places I’ve lived, there was always a military base or two (or five). The congressional district of Savannah, Georgia, has two — with two more just over the South Carolina state line. The congressional district of Pensacola, Florida, has seven! Even after several rounds of BRAC (Base Relocation and Closure), the South is full of military bases.

Here’s my theory. In the long, long wake of the Civil War, the federal government decided to station thousands of troops in the region — as a deterrent against future rebellions. And, as local economies became more and more dependent on federal military dollars, the idea of another secession became more and more impractical. What we’re looking at is a long-term occupation. Giving the locals a say in naming the bases was just window dressing to “nice’ify” the continuing presence of Union troops.

Maybe it is no longer necessary to placate the locals, but it seems pretty obvious to me that the federal government was not honoring the rebels; it was using them.

A solution for students in classrooms?

Like most everyone else, I’ve been following the controversy over reopening the schools and sympathizing with our poor school administrators who have to somehow come up with measures to educate our children as best as possible amid the current pandemic.

It has reminded me of my own experience during a crisis in the 1950s. When I was in elementary school, starting in 1954, there were so many baby boomers showing up for school that I had over 60 classmates in first grade. That didn’t work out so well, so in second grade, while a new classroom building was being constructed, the class was split in two. Half of us went to school 7:30 a.m.-noon, and the other half went from 1-5:30 p.m. When the new classrooms were ready for my third grade experience, that solved the problem (though I always had more than 45 classmates throughout elementary school).

Certainly having school for half a day was far from ideal. But I still wonder if such a plan might prove useful this coming school year, depending on how this plague develops. It would make for an awfully long day for the teachers, though having (say) 15 kids in class for half a day each, instead of 30 for the whole day, might be some compensation. Would it make face-to-face classrooms, social distancing, and all the other COVID accommodations a little easier to achieve?