Organ Donors
Dear Editor: On Valentine’s Day it will be six months and a day since I received the most unselfish gift imaginable. I received a heart from a donor.
The original intent of this letter to the editor was to encourage people to become donors, but have since discovered that 83% of Alaskans are donors. So now this letter is to offer sincere thanks.
Thank you to all 587,927 of you.
Randy Berlin, Sitka
Tourism
Dear Editor: The following letter also was sent to the Tourism Task Force members.
One night, a man was searching intently for a lost object. A passerby asks “what are you looking for so carefully”? “My keys, I have lost my keys.” “You lost them out here and cannot find them?” “No, I lost them in the dark alley back there.” “Well, why are you looking for them out here?” “Because the light is better here under the street light, of course.”
This debate of tourism and “more or less cruise ship passengers” with regard to the maintenance of the Sitka we all love and want to sustain is like looking for the keys under the street lamp. It is not where things got lost.
The real issue about our quality of life being eroded is not about the number of tourists who come to Sitka or not. It is about the enormous demands including land, energy, Internet bandwidth, and traffic level – in short, ALL the resource demands placed on our little city by the increasing volume of federal, state, and municipal development in our city as well as the increasing tourism. We have evolved from a small fishing community on an island off the coast of Alaska to a government reliant community with most of the revenues coming into Sitka, not generated in Sitka but originating off island. Another way to say that is that the financial control and wellbeing of our lives is not in our hands but in the hands of those who are distant from here and have no real regard for what it is like to be a Sitkan.
I think it is imperative to change the debate and solutions from the tunnel-vision of a fixed number of cruise ship passengers and to address the real and crucial issue of WHO is going to manage our resources and HOW are they going to be managed. THAT is what we need a solution for, not just the number of cruise ship passengers (even if the light is brighter on the cruise ship passengers).
Dr. Rob Parker, Sitka
