To The Editor:

Last weekend, our beloved Welsh Terrier, Jaynie,  Houdinied herself out of our parked car. I watched in horror as she rocketed down Main Street. Her little ears were flapping   joyfully in the wind. The bubble over her head must have read something like, “Yippee, I am free and on my way to mess with those River Museum ducks.”

Fortunately, one of Essex’s finest passed by in his patrol car.  With officer Belcourt’s guidance and a neighbor’s agility, Jaynie was scooped-up and returned to her grateful parents. Later on, I began thinking about our first responders and how lucky we are to have their help and protection. I will never forget the letter on your online news written by Jerry Wilson. Jerry was writing to thank officer Kenafick for responding to his call to Town Hall asking for help with a fallen tree. Officer Kenafick arrived on the scene and equal to Paul Bunyan lifted the tree off the driveway.

Of course small issues lead to the big issues. How do these men and women and all our first responders do what they do? When they get that 911 call, they never know exactly what is on the other end.  First responders to fires, car crashes, natural disasters, domestic violence, robberies, medical emergencies and more are heroes. They seem to have something extra in their DNA.  Maybe it’s “Grit” that allows this special breed to remain cool, dedicated and brave under unimaginable circumstances.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the first responders, not only for the warm and fuzzy thing that they do, but for their extreme bravery under extreme pressures.  I write with my deepest respect for these men and women.

Sincerely,

Alison Nichols, M.Div., Essex CT

To the Editor:

I am scratching my head in wonderment over President Obama’s Inaugural address in which he pledged to address the “threat of climate change.” Why now? The economy is shrinking. Seven million people are poised to lose their health insurance under Obama Care. Unemployment, underemployment and those no longer looking for employment is a real crisis in America. And our President is focused on a hoax created by the UN. Perhaps now that Obama is sinking in the polls, he will, in his State of the Union address to the nation, focus on the real issues facing America.

Obama knows that “climate change” is a giant hoax. John Kerry, the new “climate-change” secretary of state, knows it is a hoax. And yes, the guy who has made gobs of money perpetuating the false beliefs surrounding the hoax, the king of carbon-credits, Al Gore, also knows it’s a hoax. Not only has Gore’s book (An Inconvenient Truth) been used in schools to indoctrinate our kids and grandkids, but this giant hypocrite has just raked in one hundred million dollars from oil monies after claiming that fossil fuel is the culprit in “climate change.” The inconvenient truth is that the earth’s climate has been warming, cooling and dramatically changing from the beginning of time. For goodness sake, the plague in 1867 is blamed on weather. Chinese sea captains reported melting ice caps as far back as 1434. Mega earthquakes and Tsunamis as well as blizzards, “raging fires, crippling droughts, powerful storms,” horrific tornadoes and scorching heat waves have also been around since antiquity.

Thankfully, a majority of Americans are no longer drinking the climate cool- aid passed out by liberal/progressives, or better “UNers.” We are beginning to ferret-out the truth that this hoax was created by the UN to gain power to itself. The plan was conceived in 1987 as a means to achieve “Global Government” through a manufactured crisis. Who can forget the words of Obama’s former chief of staff, the present mayor of Chicago, who said, “never let a crisis go to waste.”   We have been duped. All the over-arching rules and regulations have been used to force citizens to obey a doctrine that is fallacious.

The creators of the giant hoax, the UN and its sycophants, realized, brilliantly I might add, that its Agenda, that openly targets private property with oppressive regulations, had to be established on a local level first. That said, it is up to each of us to discern if our local boards, commissions and legislature are loaded with “UNers.” Are those serving selflessly performing their civic duties and looking out for the citizens of their towns and districts- or is their agenda the UN Agenda? Our founders were counting on ordinary citizens to speak out to protect our rights.

I wonder, do “We the People” of our great nation really want to be manipulated by the UN? Do we care that this UN invasion into our country will ultimately strip away our freedoms? Do we care that “global warming” hype, “climate change” hype and “rising sea levels” hype is a sinister means of enforcing the idea that the collective takes a front seat to individual rights? Inherent in this idea is the belief that the government can “plan” our lives better than the individual.

Liberal/progressives have very effectively demonized and dismissed the canaries in the coal mine as whacky, paranoid conspiracy theorists. No, the canaries understand that the invasion of the UN agenda has ushered in “a long train of abuses and usurpations” that the Constitution warned would threatened our Freedom and Liberty.

Many Americans watched Paul Harvey’s stellar tribute to our Farmers delivered in a commercial at the Super Bowl.  Have you heard the recording of Harvey’s prescient “warning for a nation” delivered in 1965? It is entitled, “If I Were the Devil.” Please, google it!

Sincerely,

Alison Nichols,
Essex, CT

To The Editor:

Here we go again. The Middle East is a powder keg and four of our patriots have been viciously killed. Now the violence has spread to Northern Africa. The Obama foreign policy is not working; it is meek, weak, hide-and-seek. We should have known that candidate Obama was flying high on out-of-control-narcissism when he claimed that the day he was inaugurated Muslim hostility would ease. This kind of hatred and violence is too deeply rooted to be ameliorated by one man who sees his presidency as the time when the “rise of oceans begin to slow and the planet begins to heal.” What kind of leadership is this?

The human community has suffered from bloodshed in the name of religion since antiquity. The conquest of more than two thirds of the Christian world by Muslims and the bloody retaliatory crusades that responded centuries later, the Spanish Inquisition, Auschwitz, Treblinka, the slaughter of Jews by their Christian neighbors and “friends” in the polish town of Jedwabne, ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, hatred between Pakistan and India, the Muslim jihad against Christians in Indonesia, the horrific and savage “holy war” launched by fundamentalist Muslims on September eleven, the slaughter of Christians in Pakistan, and the murder and mayhem now in the middle East are but a few examples of the havoc reaped because of humanity’s basic insecurity and fear that cuts deep into the heart of the human community.

As I see it, our intolerance towards each other is an out-picturing of a deep sense of fear and abandonment that exists in the psyche of the human community. We have been cast into the world to fend for ourselves and to grapple with loss and end of life issues. What other species is unconsciously, if not consciously, riveted to loss and death? We know that we and our loved ones are going to die, yet we have no idea how death will come, when it will come, or who, if anyone, has the right answers as to what happens after death. This is the cruel fate of humanity.

And for most of us, the need to believe that our loved ones and we exist after death in some rarified form, or another, is the strongest and most urgent force within us. Whether it is psychic, cosmic, or biological, our belief in immortality is more basic than our need for sex and nourishment.

Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, we have created, been given, or inherited over two thousand religions to help allay our fears about “end things.” Essentially, religion has been based on disassociating the idea of death and ceasing to exist. Virtually all religions promise some form of afterlife-with death as an end of temporal life and the beginning of something else.

While it is true that millions of humans profess to have no religious yearnings or concerns about their fate after death, for most of us, whether we are willing to admit it or not, the thought of not having the “right” answers as to what happens to us after death is untenable. As a result, life has become a battleground of intolerance and hatred.

It seems almost diabolic that the religious teachings that ostensibly provide us with our symbols, our values, our purpose and our comfort are so often the fuel that ignites violence and hatred between humans who look and think differently. Throughout our history we have witnessed the use of sacred texts- perverted, interpolated, misunderstood and misrepresented to justify savage cruelty by extremists from many faiths.

Most of humanity wants to rid our planet of the cruelty that we continue to inflict upon each other. However, looking for love in all the wrong places is naïve at best. At this time in human history, Islamic extremist have Americans squarely in their cross hairs. Obsequiousness will not heal this deeply rooted hatred.

Did this administration learn anything from September 11?  It was the timidity and perceived weakness of America during the Clinton administration that allowed Global Terror Inc. to implode on Ground Zero at the beginning of the Bush administration.

American foreign policy must be hardened to protect us here and around the world. Perhaps, instead of sending the bust of Sir Winston Churchill back to English diplomats, Obama should have put the bust on his desk in the Oval Office as a reminder of strong leadership. “Victory at all cost, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.”

Sincerely,

Alison Nichols,
Essex, CT