Energy and its dangers
Winds turbines kill birds ("Mike Jones: Energy and the environment: Why not have both?," Sept. 8). Without a doubt. What about all the animals that die each year in mud pits and pump jacks and let's not forget oil spills?
We need energy and, be it from hydrocarbons or wind or waves or the sun, there are consequences and one of these is that sometimes animals will die in the mechanisms producing energy....
Brice Bogle, Broken Arrow
Underfunding education damages state
It would seem that it would strike anyone as (common sense) that the best way for a state to shoot itself in the foot is to undervalue and underfund education ("Study: Oklahoma tops cuts to per-pupil spending since recession," Sept. 13). It doesn't bode well for the future of Oklahoma.
Collin Hinds, Tulsa
Gun raffle supported
What they raffled off was a $500 gift card to a legal gun shop, they did nothing wrong, immoral or illegal ("Bixby Youth Football team raffles pistol to pay for expenses," Sept. 12). Great idea.
Wish I had known about it as I would have purchased tickets.
I applaud the creativity.
Pete Smith, Tulsa
Editor's note: A Sept. 8 online comment lacked context. The comment was in response to another online comment that was not included. Also, in the editing process, an honorific title was changed, changing the gender of the person referred to. Both comments appear here in correct form:
No Big Guy
My great-grandfather is the same person as the great-grandfather of Mark Costello, my brother ("Mark Costello: Labor Day is a celebration of entrepreneurialism and economic opportunity," Aug. 31). Our great-grandfather was named Dennis Coyle, a son of a Pennsylvania farm laborer. Rather than work the farm fields, Dennis worked the booming oil fields as a driller. He followed the work. He worked for the Big Guy, the entrepreneur that my brother keeps talking about. And while Dennis followed the day-labor work to places like West Virginia, Oklahoma, Texas and Colorado, my great-grandmother Flodelia ran a boarding house back in Pennsylvania to support herself and three children, one of whom was my grandmother. But Flodelia died suddenly and young, and Dennis moved his children to an Indian orphanage in Chickasha, one run by the Catholic Church, so he could continue to labor in the oil fields. My grandmother eventually graduated from the orphanage and attended nursing school at St. Anthony Hospital in Oklahoma City. Dennis eventually, after circling through oil patches in Texas and Colorado, returned to Oklahoma, where he lived near downtown Oklahoma City in boarding houses and hotels. He died in St. Anthony Hospital in 1948. All of these facts can be verified. My brother and his publicist do an astonishing and admirable job of conflating entrepreneurs with laborers and of casting my great-grandfather in such a way that he seems like a big-shot oilman. But in doing so, they completely miss the point of this holiday weekend. Labor Day is about my great-grandfather and my great-great grandfather the farm laborer and the millions and millions of Americans just like them who are ordinary, hard-working people - laborers - the backbone of this great nation. These are the people we celebrate this weekend, not entrepreneurs.
Alice Costello, Edmond
Thank you
Thank you Ms. Costello. Commissioner Costello certainly has lost sight of those it is his duty to support and protect and who really built this country through their hard work.
Frank Chambers, Stillwater
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Reader Forum
The incarceration rate in Oklahoma is among the highest in the nation with approximately 26,000 people behind bars at any given time.
The Nov. 28, 2008, Tulsa World published my Readers Forum piece, "Antietam," in which I reported on a visit my then-8-year-old grandson, Stevie, and I made to Antietam battlefield in rural Maryland.
