February 2008
Kayla picked up a Courier & said my letter quoting Eisenhower got printed!
They titled it “Words Ring True”
To the Editor:
Recent stories in the Courier have talked about the high cost of maintenance and upgrades of Town property, schools, roads, sidewalks, etc. For example, the story on Lakeway Elementary School (Wednesday, February 6) says the district has spent $413,000 in the last two years on renovations and upgrades. Meanwhile, we are spending over $300,000,000 a day on the war in Iraq. That’s Three Hundred Million dollars. Every ten minutes we spend about two million dollars, enough to build a new police facility for the town and have $700,000 left over for the schools. The war has not brought democracy to the Iraqis, lowered the price of gas, or made anyone safe from terrorism.The words Dwight Eisenhower spoke in 1953 are more pertinent than ever: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people…” The dollar amounts may have changed since 1953, but not the basic idea.
Jenny Deupree, Franconia, NH 03580