There was so much in the Gazette's Letters column today that I had to post my thoughts on some of them...
A letter by "Uncommon Sense" captioned as "Deal with road baddies" highlights the fact that one driver managed to accumulate thousands of dollars' worth of fines before his case came before the courts. Was the driver notified of his fault and continued to drive anyway, or was there some delay in issuing the notification? The whole EVR situation may need to be reviewed at any rate.
Then we have a Canadian visitor lamenting that the Dolphin Quest business has penned their dolphins in a small swimming tank. This issue generally is out of my range, but I can see each side of the issue. Zoos and related facilities are there to showcase animals and provide living habitats while allowing for research into conservation and the like, but I would tend to agree that large social animals like dophins probably don't benefit from being restricted to a small area and being there to amuse wealthy visitors (and the occasional school trip).
Later on there's another (and it's played to death) letter about the Arizona sheriff who has inmates working on chain gangs and so forth. If this wasn't true, it would be a chain letter. Not gonna happen here in "the iiiiiiisland (tm Beyonce)".
We now come to one of my favourite topics, free public transport. Someone under the name "Ferry Rider" writes essentially the same thing that I've said for ages. They go on to add that it could become eventually a service to suffer from a budget cut as it generates less and less income. Which would be a travesty, considering that public transportation has to be considered a neccessity in Bermuda.
Focus has to be on availability and convenience rather than cost, but everybody in Government seems to think otherwise. Or doesn't care.
The next letter starts off parroting the "free transport saves money/oil/reduce traffic" spiel (that has not proven to work) notion but it gets better. Foreigners getting off scot free? The author raises concern that Government believes that all non-Bermudians don't pay taxes. Keep an eye on that.
There's some worthy praise for organisations such as the Sea Cadets and Raleigh International that comes next. Good to see this stuff.
Next is a rant about Government spending money on the National Sports Centre swimming facility. The author seems familiar and I think that he's simply an anti-sports crusader (if I recall he was against funding the cricket programme a couple of years ago). He seems to believe that nothing should be spent on sports and the like when there's a housing crisis.
I definitely believe that the housing crisis takes precedence over sports facilities, and Government should endeavour to get their housing projects completed with utmost priority. However, funds should always be invested in programmes that benefit the youth, and the swimming associations have suffered for years, limited by lack of a international-standard facility. To indict "the PLP" negatively for this venture is in poor taste. Luckily this guy lives in Arizona and probably has both a house and a community pool to enjoy. Okay, low blow, sorry.
Finally, Barack Obama gets more recognition for being a uniter of people rather than a divider and if there's one positive thing that the U.S. elections gave, it's that people were more motivated to vote and feel like their country was coming together instead of being torn apart.
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