Biking Trail
Dear Editor: The Sitka Cycling Club would like to thank Troy’s Excavation LLC, Troy Bayne, and Alex Bayne for their donations of gravel, trail-building supplies, and effort toward creating Sitka’s first single track mountain biking trail. The club is so appreciative of all the volunteers who have (safely, usually solo, and while keeping a safe distance if others are around) worked to get Sitkans riding in the woods off the Cross Trail early this summer!
Amy Volz,
Sitka Cycling Club
Two Thoughts
Dear Editor: Sitka has food insecurities which include many age groups and walks of life. The good news is we have food banks and kind people. I’m sure gift certificates from a grocery store to any of the food banks, or other entity trying to help in this time of need, would be greatly appreciated. I would think no amount would be too small or too large.
My other thought was in regard to our temporarily retired cloth bags – how about we all turn them inside out and wash them.
Alice Wolcott, Sitka
Health Care
Dear Editor: I first encountered No Health Care for You during the Reagan presidency. I had one of those encounters with a tree in which the tree won. I will spare you the details of my fairly impressive injury. Leave it to say when the corporation I was cutting for decided that I was able to drive myself to the hospital, they did not anticipate that the hospital would turn me away for lack of proof that I had workman’s compensation. The rest of the story I have secondhand. Apparently, I passed out at the wheel and killed my engine in front of a dentist’s office. The dentist provided first aid and managed to admit me to another hospital. The tree went to a sawmill. I survived.
Another example of No Health Care for You came to my attention while I was driving taxi in Sitka during the Obama Administration. A woman repeatedly called me to take her elderly father to the hospital for chest pain. When I asked her why she did not call an ambulance, considering that the average taxi driver has no first aid skills, she explained that they could not afford the ambulance. Soon, I took the woman and her father to the hospital and they did not call for a ride home.
Now I see a president who cut the budgets of agencies essential to arranging for public health. Long before the COVID-19, situation, the president was setting the public up to be unduly vulnerable. This went hand-in-hand with his systematic callousness in support of profiteering by big pharma, who not only had brought us the opioid epidemic, but also engages to this day in business practises such as the over-pricing of insulin. In a paroxysm of No Health Care for You, the current administration works hard to dismantle what little imperfect mandate we were able to scrape together under the aegis of Obamacare.
Now that we have seen that we are all in this virus thing together, I strongly suggest that if you want to make sure that there will be No Health Care for You, then vote for the incumbent president in November.
John Welsh, Sitka
