Opinion articles provide independent perspectives on key community issues, separate from our newsroom reporting.

Letters to the Editor

Letters: Nonprofits benefit from community’s generosity; ‘Send in the clowns’

Nonprofits benefit from community’s generosity

We are grateful to everyone who participated in University Baptist and Brethren Church’s Alternative Christmas Fair this year. Because of your generosity, $86,026 was raised.

The 31 charities that benefited include: Centre for Alternatives in Community Justice, Centre County PAWS, Centre County Youth Service Bureau, Centre Helps, Centre LGBTQA Support Network, CentrePeace, Centre Region Down Syndrome Society, Centre Safe, Centre Volunteers in Medicine, Centre Wildlife Care, Church World Service, Clearwater Conservancy of Central PA, Dyslexia Reading Center of Central PA, Habitat for Humanity of Greater Centre County, Heifer International, Hope International Services, Housing Transitions, Interfaith Human Services, Jana Marie Foundation, Midstate Literacy Council, Out of the Cold, PA Interfaith Power & Light, PA Prison Society Centre County Chapter, Park Forest Preschool, Ridgeline Language Arts, RISE-Reading Is Enlightening, Save the Children, State College Food Bank, State College Meals on Wheels, Ten Thousand Villages, and Tides Program.

Thank you all so much! See you again next year on the first Sunday in December.

Gail Addison Guss, State College. The author is the chair of the Alternative Christmas Fair Committee.

‘Send in the clowns’

Between Vonnegut and O’Toole

So many possibilities.

After two lovely years …

of calm, thoughtful leadership from President Biden and Nancy Pelosi

And those smart, creative voices from so many others in Congress

A collaborative work ethic meets success ...

COVID mitigation, free testing, new vaccines

Social Security cost of living increases of 8.7%

Environmental legislation

An actual infrastructure bill

Funded and implemented

Marriage equality

Because love is love

Saner gun and crime control measures

Debt assistance

Government funding

Precluding an imminent shutdown

Negotiation, conversation

Even, some limited bi-partisanship

And now ...

Without any evidence of a landslide ...

“Send in the clowns”

The obsequious ones

Smooches

For all the rear chassis of January 6 likely collaborators

Still seated in the Congress

The mendacious ones, the vile, the mean, the just-plain dumb

And those who fit many categories of “other”

Choose one from every column.

The cowards and the insurrectionists

And the mendacious newcomer from NY

A man with a fantastically fabricated resume

Who lies about his mother and the Holocaust

A ridiculous man now wanted in Brazil

for stealing an old man’s checkbook

To go clothes shopping.

The best and the brightest.

In the House?

Infighting and expletives dribbled into the Capitol hallway

Out of the Caucus Room this morning

The abject failure of an unimaginative vocabulary

Marylouise Markle, State College

Citizens of the world

The town has emptied as the students went home for the holidays. Their life is mine and alone in my coffee shop I feel 60% dead at 78.

But I say this is utterly irrelevant as tonight the refugees mass at our southern border to be let in with a change of immigration law.

Now the Republican Party protests in the name of the nation state’s borders.

But they fail to see that the nation state is an obsolescent concept.

In new time the refugees mass — they are citizens of the morally uniting world.

I join them tonight, drink down my coffee and discover I am alive.

John Harris, State College
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