Making the Right Choice
Before I get started on my letter, I want to say a special thanks to all the nice people who have stopped and signed the pro-choice petition. I enjoyed meeting all of you at many locations throughout Geauga County.
It was about five years ago when a young couple I know decided to start their family. After some difficulty they were very excited when they were able to conceive. Things went very well for the first couple of months. Then test results began to show abnormalities by the third month. The ultrasound was showing a fetus with organs developing outside of the body. The doctor told them the fetus would not survive outside the womb.
Complications of trying to carry the fetus to term would, at best, render the mother sterile and possibly endanger her life. This was about the saddest news this young couple could have, because they truly wanted a child.
Because they lived in another state and after much consultation with the physician, they decided to terminate the pregnancy.
About a year and a half later, they again became pregnant and this time everything went wonderfully well. Now they have a delightful curly headed 3-year old. Both mother and child are healthy. The decision they made was the right one. Two lives are in my life where there probably would have been none. I call that pro-life.
David Partington
Munson Township
Drama or No Drama?
Before I assumed the head of my department at work, I spoke to an acknowledged leader in his field and asked him what his best advice was for leading well. He said simply, “Don’t do drama.” It was the soundest counsel I could have received. Not doing drama creates a quiet, cheerful, harmonious working environment that allows an organization in turn to do much good work.
Our country recently witnessed the benefits of a leader’s not doing drama. President Biden signed into a law a bipartisan bill that raised our debt limit, thus preventing a catastrophic national and international financial collapse. He did so with grace, humility and, thanks to the hard work of others, both Democrats and Republicans.
The act was consonant with a campaign of executive action over the last two and a half years that has led to the passage of a number of bills unprecedented since President Lyndon Johnson’s administration in the 1960s, chiefly among them an infrastructure bill, gun-control legislation and an inflation reduction act that moves this country forward in the areas of healthcare and the mitigation of climate change, all the while raising taxes on the super-rich and large corporations and decreasing the deficit. Throughout his tenure, he has sought to act, when he can, in a respectful, bipartisan manner.
Contrast this example of quiet leadership with that of our previous president and the candidate currently best poised to become the next Republican nominee for the President in 2024: a president who lied, preened, boasted, pontificated, yelled, bullied, stomped, raged, demeaned the honorable, fleeced his supporters, used his office to profit his businesses, threatened vengeance against his perceived enemies, encouraged violence against hecklers, threw plates of food on the floor and against walls (witness the House Select Committee proceedings), stymied efforts to stop the spread of COVID to promote his reelection chances, sought to extort false testimony from a foreign leader also to help his re-election campaign (see his first impeachment trial), called fallen military heroes “suckers” (according to multiple sources, including General John Kelly), has sexually abused women (witness the Hollywood Access tape and the E. Jean Carroll trial), and, in the immediate aftermath of his reelection defeat, may have perpetrated a series of crimes to overturn an election and subvert the Constitution (we shall see).
During his noisy, tumultuous, divisive, and exhausting presidency, his major pieces of legislation and executive action involved the passage of a tax-cut that benefited chiefly the very rich or wealthy corporations, curtailed migration across our southern border through brutal means, built several miles of his vaunted border wall, and ballooned our debt and deficit in proportions far beyond those of his immediate predecessors or his successor in the Oval Office. Throughout his tenure as president, he often impugned, vilified, and demonized Democratic opponents.
Who would we like our next president to be: one who doesn’t do drama or one who excels at performing the most appalling forms of it?
John McBratney
Munson Township
