Keep on keeping on

Dear Editors,

I just read your editorial about the originating philosophy and first five years of the Telegraph. I just wanted to let you know how much I appreciate your efforts every week to make the Telegraph the informative, funny, irreverent paper that it is. A town as unique as Durango (and its inhabitants) needs an alternative news/entertainment source to the standard daily paper. A highlight of my week is sitting down on Thursday with the latest edition to see what’s up and get some good laughs. You’ve been very successful at achieving your goals, and I wish you many more years of publication. Keep up the good work!

– Larry Carver, via e-mail

Feeling like the stepchild

To the Editors,

RE: Keeping dollars in Durango.

“What did we do to offend Durango?”

With approximately 8,000 attendees over Aug. 30-Sept. 3 the ka-ching as described by the other local newspaper was resounding. I met rallygoers staying in the Strater and the General Palmer. The owners of 12/2 Price T-Shirts were very pleased with sales this Labor Day Weekend compared to 2006. There was another motorcycle rally in Ignacio that was well attended. The combined direct influx of dollars to the businesses of Durango may have been in millions of dollars. Yet we, the Sugar Pine Ranch Rally, got no support from Durango. The director of DATO refused to exchange website links. The Visitor Center refused to let us leave flyers at their Santa Rita Park Office. I was told that because our rally in Mancos was outside La Plata County, DATO and the Chamber could not lend marketing support. In spite of our money, we felt like the red-headed stepchild.

For lack of a $1,500-sponsor, there was a break in the longstanding tradition of a motorcycle parade on Main Avenue. Why didn’t the city sponsor a parade which would have effectively combined the two rallies? In March, I requested a permit to hoist a banner on Main and was told that as a for-profit corporation we could not.

– Mac Musick, Director of marketing and promos for Sugar Pine Ranch Rally

The radioactive dinner table

To the Editors:

I am writing to express my concern about the possible weakening or elimination of labeling requirements for irradiated food currently under consideration by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). For those who don’t know, food irradiation is a process where food is exposed to high levels of radiation in order to kill bacteria and extend shelf life.

It is an outrage that the government would even consider taking away our right to know if the food we buy in a supermarket has been treated with radiation. It is bad enough that we have no way of knowing whether the food we eat in restaurants, school cafeterias, hospitals (or anywhere prepared foods are served), has been treated with radiation.

Food products undergo chemical changes after exposure to radiation. These cosmetic and nutritional changes in food warrant disclosure on a prominent place on the package. In addition, food that is not packaged should be accompanied by a poster in plain view of where it is displayed for sale. Labels are required by law to be truthful and not misleading to the customer. Only clear, honest and permanent labeling is acceptable for irradiated foods.

Instead of weakening or eliminating labeling requirements, the FDA needs to strengthen them. Studies show that most consumers, including myself, want irradiated food clearly labeled because we don’t want to buy or eat it. It is my right to know exactly what kind of food I am buying to feed my family.

– Sincerely, Jennifer Brown, via e-mail

Solutions to the health-care crisis

Dear Editors,

We, the League of Women Voters of La Plata County, are asking all county residents to make sure their voices are heard regarding solutions to our current health-care crisis. Using funding provided by the City of Durango

and La Plata County this past spring, a local group headed by businessman Pat Murphy called PHCCC (Primary Health Care Community Coalition), hired the consulting group John Snow Inc. (JSI) to study the crisis in the county and provide advice as to how to solve our problems. Those proposed solutions will be presented at three community input meetings to be held on Sept. 24: 9 to 10:30 a.m. at the Sun Ute Community Center in Ignacio; noon to 1:30 p.m. at the Pine River Public Library in Bayfield; and 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the Durango Recreation Center. Light refreshments appropriate to the time will be served.

Please attend and help us jointly develop the best possible solution we can.

– Jill Patton, League of Women Voters of La Plata County

A shortie

Dear Durango,

Google “real asset price histories.”

– Ed Hamilton, Durango

A little progressive wandering

Dear Editors,

I would like to officially nominate progressive intellectuals from (not exclusively but at least to begin with) the didatic Hyde Parks in both Chicago and New York to make a fair and as honest as humanly possible attempt to govern this country. I think we can all agree that this is potentially the most sophisticated and talented country in the world.

But all is not well in the land of milk and honey. And part of the reason is obviously in the way it is has been being governed for six years. I think that it is because these are such fake Republicans my friend that have been and remain in charge momentarily. It is certainly not the party of my late, heavyweight Republican father (who upon reflection would have probably preferred to be addressed politically as a British/West Indian “Tory” in some arguments if necessary) to make his point as I’ve witnessed – jeez all the boys thought we were Tory at one time for crying out loud for what that’s worth. Nor the party of Goldwater, William F. Buckley or even foreign policy Richard Nixon, all of whom I respect a bit in a couple of ways and who (Buckley) has publicly disassociated himself from Bush and this administration as I understand it.

And “above all” it’s not the party of the absolute master and most successful political performer himself, the actor and that’s what he did most often and extremely well, Ronald Reagan. Foreign and domestic policy are both in shambles while real Republicans allow him (Bush) to continue to lollygag about intellectually as well as just out and out lie to us consistently and clumsily. And he continues still, unabated with a self-destructive, delusional policy.

This is a train the majority of us would like to get off of now ,thank you very much. Do Bush & Co. truly believe that we can’t see through this violent, crazy geopolitical nightmare he has insisted on creating and dragging us all into? That’s not American to me. I’d like my country to just stop it, cool it for a (damn) minute and start to more quickly find some serious and substantial answers/ways to begin to communicate with the rest of the world more clearly about who we really are. That is after we find out for sure among ourselves.

We do know now that we are more than a bunch of Jethro Bovine Rednecks with fifth-grade educations. By all accounts, Americans as independent, private individuals, along with those great American personalities traveling the world, are really, really appreciated as I have been witness to numerous times. For what? For our sometimes-nebulous but almost always independent thought for one thing. For thought on a lot of different levels and from a number of creative and other rather unique aspects. Plus we’re about as funny as you get sans the super-paranoid conservatives. That just is.

The policies we’ve allowed “our” government to implement are an entirely different story. Alienation and cultural resistance has now become profound to this nonsense everywhere, which is precisely the problem. Serious conservatives are often ruining or is that attempting to ruin the natural “rhythm” and “constructive movement” of forward thinking and progessive people in the world.

And yet somehow this Republic and its Constitution have survived the onslaught, thank God. So far. Here’s hoping that that will continue and show itself strongly/more concretely in the November 2008 elections. Amen.

– Gracias por este. Grant D. Cyrus, via e-mail

The Bisti

A land of nuance,

The subtlety of pastels

Which demarcate eons of time.

A horizon,

The subtlety of azure above

Smoothed surfaces.

Hints of pink, green, grey and yellow.

Wood to stone.

Bone to stone. Time

Framed into the immeasurable.

Nature as Art,

The subtlety of shadow and light

Casting ghosts over

Polished pebbled agate.

The ephemeral land

And the subtlety of finding oneself in the immensity

Amongst tonal, layered mystery.

There, a tooth!

Condylarthian? A possibility!

The subtlety of natural selection.

The universe has just begun!

– Burt Baldwin