Letters to the editor for Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2014

Women should leave jobs for their families

We are losing our children because we have abandoned them. We entrust them to a sitter, later to a preschool, and then to three different places to educate them, yet mostly we are abandoning them with the excuse that they now will become smart kids.

Many moons ago, women knew what it was to sacrifice. This is one of the traits we have lost with the new age of technology. We listen to a baby through a machine in another place, not where the baby lies. In my days, I slept in a half-awake mode listening. I could hear my child turn in his crib, and I would rush to the room to be sure he was OK.

If one-half of mothers in America quit their jobs, began to live in a more frugal manner, they could experience the joy of seeing the growth patterns of one’s child. Then home school them. No one can give your child a better education than you. No worry about shootings, fire, accident, or peer pressures that lead to drug use. More needed cultural experiences at museums, zoos, art shows, church and with family.

Look at what happens when half of America’s women leave the workplace! More men now can find these vacated positions, unemployment is virtually unknown, and the economy blossoms while you are saving the children, instilling good values, and producing a person of real intellect and purpose. China did it for centuries, and the Asian mind is one of the finest on this earth.

Lenora Lee Vecchiarelli

Dayton

President is destroying nation’s exceptionalism

In a Jan. 26 letter, the writer thinks that in spite of Tea Party activists, America continues its march towards exceptionalism. I maintain the opposite — we are heading away from exceptionalism, and we can thank our president for that.

In the same way he vilifies exceptional businessmen who do not deserve to be so wealthy because, after all, they didn’t do it themselves, the government did and therefore wants them to share their wealth with the unexceptional. He has shown he also doesn’t believe the United States is exceptional. He wants to redistribute wealth so all citizens are the same but doesn’t realize the punishment attached to being exceptional diminishes motivation to be that way. He has consistently by design or ineptness, worked towards turning the U.S. into a non-exceptional place and is laying the groundwork for us to be like any number of other originally utopian but now failed, broke and irrelevant countries.

Lastly, the writer says the reason millions of immigrants want to come to the U.S. is because of its exceptionalism. I have worked with many different organized groups of immigrants. There are those who come for that legitimate reason, but there is the majority who come because we’re such an easy touch. It is internationally very well known how our government makes it so simple for people to game the system and live off taxpaying citizens, how we cater to their customs and native languages, and especially how we don’t have the stomach to enforce our immigration laws, encouraging people to overstay visas and live here illegally “in the shadows.” These benefits define American exceptionailism to far too many people. Most other countries don’t put up with it.

Rick Jenkins

Carson City