Letters: Vaccinated adults protect children; Dollar General not welcome in Aaronsburg

Vaccinated adults protect children

In Ron Reese’s op-ed claim that “Politics, science don’t mix during pandemic,” he demonstrates the opposite. He cherry-picks science to further his political agenda. While it is true that requiring children to wear masks has not been scientifically proven to show a statistical advantage in reducing COVID-19 infections among children, part of the reason may be the limited data and design of the studies. A scientist would say the results thus far are inconclusive.

Most telling is that he fails to mention the one method that has been scientifically proven to significantly reduce the potential health risks of contracting COVID-19 – vaccination. And not only does it reduce the risk for the adults who have been vaccinated, it reduces the risk that others, especially children, will be infected by adults. It furthermore reduces the risk of new variants evolving.

Setting aside politics, why would an adult citizen choose to not get vaccinated?

Dollar General not welcome in Aaronsburg

Leaving pond and fish, apple and pear trees behind, I leave the house and follow the dirt road down to the village. First stop at the meat market for tonight’s ham dinner, then the Amish farm for potatoes and broccoli and a stop for butter and fresh milk sold in a returnable glass bottle at the grocery store.

The errands are peppered with hellos, news of the family, weather talk, opinions on best products and community updates.

We know each other, we know who makes what and we are all good at something. We can name our sources.

I live in Aaronsburg, Eastern Penn’s Valley. My village is similar to many others in our valley, colorful configurations of people and preferences.

These days, there’s been a knock at our door. We tend to be welcoming people. Not this time. The unwanted visitor? A Dollar General eyeing the entrance of our village, the spot in the bend, right down the hill – where our children cross, where bicycles turn in and Amish wagons run slowly.

What pride is there to a Dollar General moving in? Pride in product? Poverty-level wages? Real estate values would be affected negatively, traffic and light pollution increased. Profits would leave our communities.

In the name of love of place, we ask Dollar General to respect what we have loved for so long and refrain from settling in Aaronsburg.

Do not take a piece of us, it is not offered nor up for grabs!

Adaptation needed in a changing world

Nero fiddled, we are told, while Rome burned.

Today world governments endlessly debate polity and budgets, seemingly unaware or unable to comprehend the crisis we face: Storms of unprecedented frequency and violence, disastrous flooding, rising sea level, blizzards, landslides, conflagrations, famine and mass migration, all on a previously unknown scale and all direct or indirect manifestations of anthropogenic global warming.

The earth was abundantly endowed with resources. Humans have exploited those resources (“ravished” might be a better word), transforming them to irrecoverable waste. In our profligacy, we have shown no regard for the future, expending finite assets like a drunken sailor. Now we must face the consequences, and the price will be high.

Today, the most immediately critical of these resources is water. The effects of climate change are evident in regional droughts, crop failures, shrinking lakes and reservoirs and declining groundwater levels around the world.

Faced with insufficient fertile soil, arable land and potable water, large scale migration is inevitable. The population shift away from the tropics toward higher latitudes north and south of the equator, begun as a trickle, has already grown to a stream and may soon become a flood.

But we can adapt to this changing world. We learned frugality during the years of the Great Depression, and can relearn to conserve, reuse and recycle. We will have to adopt a simpler, less self-indulgent life-style. It will be hard and it will be expensive. But we can do it.

We must. There is no alternative.