Letters from the week of December 4

I’m writing in regard to wannabe hipster, pseudo-clever Town Without Pity writer Scott Wilson’s take on The Kansas City Star‘s latest round of layoffs. Is this guy on crack or is he just a toolshed?

Wilson wrote: “Anyone who calls President-elect Obama a socialist is a moron.” Wow. Since Scott is clearly not the type of person to keep a dictionary, history book or anything more intellectually stimulating than Green Eggs and Ham in his house, I took the liberty of doing a Google search for the term socialism. Link after link mentions distribution of wealth — maybe Scotty wasn’t listening when Obama said, “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everyone.”

If only morons call Obama a socialist, then what does that say about the type of people who get hired by The Pitch? Hey, Scott! Obama is a socialist, and it’s painfully obvious to anyone with even a modicum of intelligence. I understand that people who make asinine statements are awarded more space in print media, but you really seemed to have jumped off the deep end.

Now that I’ve shown my aptitude for belittling others and writing in a juvenile manner, perhaps The Pitch will now ask me to write for them.

Joshua Lawson, Kansas City, Missouri

I read with interest Peter Rugg’s article on Aim4Peace. City Manager Wayne Cauthen, Justice Program Coordinator Tracie McClendon-Cole, City Councilwomen Cathy Jolly and Cindy Circo, in my opinion, are pushing a program on Kansas City residents that failed in Chicago and other cities. Instead of asking the community organizations that work and strive to make their representative areas and all of Kansas City livable without drugs, gangs and homicides, Aim4Peace was pushed on the communities. It was proposed that the community organizations recruit 10 new members a month for Aim4Peace, have monthly meetings just for this organization, be on call 24 hours a day, go to a shooting, pray for the victim, have a barbecue dinner for the family, talk with the family involved to discourage retaliation, and act as a mediator between the gangs, and encourage them to get job training when they could make $1,000 a week selling drugs and were willing to kill someone for retaliation purposes.

Instead of financially supporting the community organizations that know what is going on in their communities, City Hall started an organization that failed elsewhere and gave them an initial budget of $600,000 with an estimated later cost of $1 million.

What a waste of resources, when this money could have been used wisely by the community organizations that know the problems in their communities and know how to solve them.

Who knows the street better than another gang member? When the budget gets to $2 million and no real success is measured, what then?

Robert Stout, Kansas City, Missouri

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