Editorial

In short, we all need to use reusable carryout bags. It’s good for you and for the environment. Why do we need reusable carryout bags?  

In addition to Breast Cancer Awareness, October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Yes, there is less fan-fare or major community activity, still, Men Evolving Non-Violently (M.E.N.) is quietly celebrating the efforts made towards greater awareness about an issue that has been under the radar for far too long.  Laws have been changed and more services are available to women and children who have been abused or are in danger, yet we still have a long way to go.    

One might say that the current dispute about a flight school at the Healdsburg Municipal Airport is simply a NIMBY issue by folks who live near the airport. The rest of you could say,  “It doesn’t affect me”….or does it?

Driving up the Oregon coast we heard a radio interview with a woman, someone who lived in the far-off troubled Arab world, I think she was Lebanese, saying she takes her family to the beach because people don’t usually bomb beaches. That’s something I never thought about. But here I was imagining a mother grabbing sunhats and sand buckets to take time off from war.

The response letters in the Healdsburg Tribune’s “Letters to the Editor” to Dave Henderson and my letters criticizing Gary Plass for not endorsing a ban on assault weapons made me realize that although there are many people who agree with our opinion there are also plenty who don’t. It was interesting to see the various views on the same subject. Most of us here in Sonoma County are liberals - mostly center-left but liberals just the same. Although we are technically part of the Bay Area we are still a rather rural community which is traditionally conservative. The divergent opinions have led to a healthy discourse which is one of the things that make our American way of life, as Vladimir Putin put it, “exceptional.”

Some people with Medicare are asking lately if their Medicare coverage is affected by the new the Health Insurance Marketplace that starts in 2014.

I was heading home from a Giants game t’other day (that’s how Shakespeare would write ‘the other day’), sitting on the back of the ferry boat (or the stern of the ship as Shakespeare the sailor would have written). It was a lovely day. The sun was shining, the mist was refreshing, the Giants against all odds had won and the beer had given me a pleasant life-is-good-and-I-love-all-human-beings vibe.

One of the reasons so many people in Healdsburg say “we are so lucky to live here,” is the Healdsburg Museum. On par with the city’s beloved library, the Museum is a keeper of the community’s culture.

In celebration of National Pollution Prevention Week, Sept. 16 to 20, the Russian River Watershed Association and the City of Petaluma are once again sponsoring the Safe Medicine Disposal Round-Up Week.

Some time ago a column entitled “Religion challenges left and right” by E. J. Dionne, Jr. appeared in the Press Democrat. “Whenever I write sympathetically about religion,” he noted, “I get bombarded with tweets and notes from readers who normally agree with me but cannot abide by the idea that religious belief should be seen as intellectually serious.” Having made that caveat he goes on to treat religion seriously in a summary of a study produced by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution. Dionne himself took part in the research for the study. The study divides citizens into four groups: 28 percent religious conservatives, 38 percent religious moderates, 19 percent religious progressives, and 15 percent nonreligious. These groups are correlated to political attitudes and party affiliations.  Not surprisingly, most religious conservatives are politically conservative and gravitate to the Republican Party, and most religious progressives and nonreligious are politically liberal and gravitate to the Democratic party.  Also not surprisingly, religious moderates are in between and just as they are religiously moderate they tend to be moderate Republicans or moderate Democrats in fairly equal numbers.