Letters 4-20

Hilo trash

Why didn’t West
Hawaii residents know

Why am I not surprised that Hilo trash is being dumped on the west side without our having been told beforehand? As long as our wealthy West Hawaii snowbirds continue to pay their property taxes here and vote elsewhere Kenoi and his henchmen will continue to feed at that trough and continue to demonstrate their utter contempt for the west side.

Gil Taylor

Kailua-Kona

Geothermal

Third-world nations not where solution is found

I live in Leyte, Philippines. Living like a caveman on my pension is easy. But if I wanted to depend on no blackout from electric disturbances, this is not the place to be. I hope the mayor and his contingency asked that question when he was here to investigate how successful their geothermal program was really working.

I don’t think first-rate nations should be looking at third-world nations for solutions to their energy problems.

Thomas Provalenko

Waimea

Coral clean up

Coral adds
calcium to soil

Regarding the letter by Michelle Tomas of Kailua-Kona, April 9, “Roadside memorials were not touched” and titled by you “Coral cleanup response”: Tomas says she and her group “calculated the coral to be more than 5 tons” that they “returned to the shore.” How? In what amounts? Did they take small bucketfuls to hundreds of different places where they had been gathered by the message-writers? How would the shore react to 10,000 pounds of coral dumped at one location? How would the reef or the ocean animals react?

We have a problem with acidity of our soils, both because of acid rain from our volcano but also because of aerosol spraying being conducted worldwide. We probably need the coral on our soils to add calcium and counteract the acid. The concept of “unintended consequences” comes to mind. This so often rears its surprising head when we try to do good, to be pono, to do the right thing. A big-picture view must be our goal.

Donna Worden

Kapaau

Education

Keep cursive
writing in schools

Recently, I attended a hunter safety course designed to provide newcomers with the skills and knowledge to be a better, safer hunter. More than 40 people attended the course. Among the participants was a boy who had just turned 10 – the minimum age to attend the course. As part of enrolling in the course, each person has to furnish a government ID and put their signature below their name information on the enrollment form.

Our 10-year-old really didn’t know how to sign his name — he used block letters. I’m sure you’ve heard our school systems are stopping the teaching of cursive writing as “not needed in an electronic age.” Well, I can see it coming — soon people will be unable to sign their names in the normal fashion because they’ve never learned cursive writing. Another win for our educational system.

A long time ago the legal system had to deal with illiterate individuals who did not know how to sign their names — they could only scrawl an X, so then the documents had to be witnessed by someone else who could sign their name and witness the X belonged to the person who was supposed to sign the document. Will we be coming to that again, when our new generations are unable to sign their names? Will we need a group of special witnesses to make sure those Xs belong to whom they claim?

Is this what our educational system is going to do to us? Let’s keep cursive writing — and writing in general — in the school curriculum.

Jim Monk

Captain Cook