Letters: Remember safety this heating season; Vaccinations protect all

Remember safety this heating season

A fireman is your friend. He is on call to put his life on the line for others. It is my opinion that a typical Centre County fireman will try his best to enter a burning building to rescue the perishing. Thanks to our firefighters for their willingness to be a help to us.

On the other hand sometimes we do things that are thoughtless safety hazards and put ourselves and our firefighters more at risk. This is a great season to check our electric cords and plugs, have our furnace maintained and pipes and chimneys cleaned and checked. I have heard of pipes with holes and of blocked chimneys. The expense to clean a chimney or maintain a furnace is, of course, much less than having a chimney fire.

It is good to have a fire extinguisher handy and to be careful with candles, space heaters, wood stoves, and grills. Just last night I was at the emergency room and met a young man who squirted charcoal lighter on some wood that he was trying to burn. He told me the skin on his stomach “just melted away.”

I hope readers will do what they can to help keep themselves and our selfless firemen safe this Christmas and throughout the heating season.

Vaccinations protect all

As a reminder of how serious a problem COVID-19 is please remember that another name for Covid is SARS — Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.

Let me break this down.

Severe — something extremely bad

Acute — something bad experienced to an intense degree

Respiratory — something affecting the action of breathing

Syndrome — a group of symptoms

So the very name SARS, also known as COVID-19, means a virus that causes breathing symptoms that are extremely bad and suffered to an intense degree.

Over 80,000 people are coming down with COVID every day in the U.S.

Nearly 800,000 people in the USA have died from COVID.

Soon COVID-19 will have taken over twice the number of U.S. citizens that died in World War II. And yet people still refuse to be vaccinated.

If you wish to help COVID develop newer more dangerous varieties all you need to do is refuse to be vaccinated.

Those who refuse to be vaccinated are serving as a host body for the COVID viruses. In other words, unvaccinated people are living incubators for the COVID virus as it mutates into new even more dangerous infectious SARS diseases.

Personally, I would rather get vaccinated and help my fellow humans rather than serve as a walking petri dish for a deadly virus. Yuck.

Stand out in concerning political climate

As a child, I was aware that if my Jewish friend and I had been born in Nazi Germany 10 years earlier, her family would have been targeted — not mine. I have always asked myself, “What enabled the Holocaust?” While the answer to that question is complex, “On Tyranny” (Graphic Edition) by historian Timothy Snyder and German artist Nora Krug is a frightening warning as well as an important guide on how to resist modern day authoritarianism.

Every citizen should be extremely concerned by the current climate in the U.S. One of the most egregious recent acts was committed by Rep. Gosar. It is disturbing that Rep. Gosar felt that posting a video representing himself murdering Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking the president was proper behavior for a U.S. Congress member. As a public school teacher, if I had posted a video depicting myself violently attacking a colleague, I would have been deservedly fired. Rep. Gosar was censured in Congress with only two Republicans, Reps. Liz Chaney and Rep. Kinzinger, condemning his actions. To make matters worse, Rep. Gosar retweeted the video after he was censured. He remains remorseless.

Lesson 2 in Snyder’s book is “Defend Institutions, It is institutions that help us preserve decency.” Lesson 5: “Remember professional ethics, when political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important.” Lesson 8: “Stand out. Someone has to.” Reps. Chaney and Kinzinger stood out. Tragically, my representative, Rep. Keller, went along with his cronies.