Editorial

Scientific worldview

Matthew Hall was hired as a reporter for the Healdsburg Tribune in 2006. He has been the editor of the Windsor Times for seven years, and during that time also served as the Tribune’s editor during vacations and maternity leaves.

For the last 15 years, I have been a volunteer in prisons, teaching convicted felons in the field of sociology and running self-help groups. Most of my students are “lifers,” men who have been convicted of serious crimes like murder, rape, or burglary for which they have received sentences of 15 years to life and much more. None of them are on death row, and most are now eligible for parole, having served their minimum sentences. Often, they have served far longer.

July 1 is the start of a new fiscal year for local governments. This is when the county, cities and schools start spending new tax money based on recently approved 2016-2017 budgets. All these budgets tend to launch with the same conclusions: there is never enough tax revenue; there are too many unmet needs; employee and pension costs keep going up; and everything could be solved if we only agreed to raise new taxes and vote for more long term debt bonds.

Will Campbell, prophet, preacher, writer, civil rights activist, who always maintained a love/hate relationship with the church, recently passed away.  Although he called himself a “steeple drop-out”, he never tired of challenging pastors, “to minister to the hurt wherever you find it and live in hope even in the midst of tragedy.”  And after all his years of confrontation with injustice and racism, he still spoke of loving our enemies as our sisters and brothers because, “God loves them, and us, anyway.”  

There is an energy bill before Congress that needs your