>La Grande Observer | Union and Wallowa Counties' News Leader

I'd like to respond to the article in The Observer of Sept. 4 regarding the gap in Medicare part D.

It really is a shame that so many senior citizens have been duped and are now having to pay not only full price for their medicine, but they still have to pay the monthly fee for the plan they have chosen.

The main problem is that when seniors inquired about a plan, the representatives failed to explain that it's not what you pay that goes toward the $2,250 limit, but what the medicine actually costs. If I only have to pay $15 or $20 for my prescription, you would think it would take quite a while to get up to $2,250. However, if the cost without insurance would be $490, it doesn't take long at all.

My experience with all this was quite troubling. I inquired about several different plans and with each one I had to argue with them to get the facts. Had I not questioned them over and over, they wouldn't have said anything.

With the medicine that I take, if I had signed up for a plan, it would have cost me a lot more than doing without any plan. You could go months not only paying full price, but also having to pay the premium.

No one wanted to come out with the truth on Medicare Part D and now there are many seniors in a bind because of it. I had several people tell me that I should sign up and save. After I did a lot of figuring, I decided not to sign up and I'm a lot better off because I didn't. Too bad all the insurance companies are interested in is making more money, and the seniors have to pay the consequence.

Kay Anicker, Elgin

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I would like to thank the operator of the brown car that was westbound on Spring Street, in front of the Presbyterian Church at about noon Monday.

Your very attentive driving and skills undoubtedly saved the life of the child that darted out from behind the pickup truck without looking either way before running across Spring Street.

As the scene unfolded, I feared that I was about to watch a parent's worst nightmare unfold before me. Thank you again for your quick actions and response and rest assured that the young man was counseled by several of us who watched this incident, and his mother.

Ron Lesley, La Grande

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This is a great place to live because of the people.

Neighbor to Neighbor started as an ecumenical organization to help the disabled and the elderly stay in their homes. We gave them respect while we mowed their yards, washed their windows and took them to their doctor appointments.

But the need grew and the community rose up to meet it. We now have a food bank, lodging help and both food and gas vouchers. We help with many other needs, including minor car repairs. One of our projects of the past few years has been emergency wood supply. It is this ministry that now is in trouble.

We are searching for a new director for this project who will be able to handle the paperwork and be capable of organizing our volunteer wood haulers. We are always looking for more wood haulers who are willing and able to provide transportation.

Our next step is to involve local churches in a more vital role. Each month we will be looking for churches to serve as hosts. This rotation will share the burden of the work, while also keeping this vital provision available.

We have lost our Elgin coordinators and will be ceasing this service, at least temporarily, to the Elgin area. The only service that we are able to provide will depend on individuals adopting other families and simply agreeing to deliver wood on the same schedule in which they pick up their own supply.

We are looking for wood that we can continue to give to our community. We are capable of hauling and splitting wood and look forward to each seed that we can sow in our valley.

This loving, giving community is able to meet these needs. Contact 963-9126 to let us know how you can help.

Loree Leonard, Chair, Neighbor to Neighbor

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Hey, did you hear? Union is hosting the 2,000 bicyclists of Cycle Oregon 2006 from Wednesday afternoon, all day Thursday and until they depart early Friday morning this coming week!

During that time they will be here, they will be entertained in the City Park and on the streets of the city. Coming from all over the United States and several foreign countries, they are generally people very interested in the history, business and recreation of where they visit.

Wouldn't they love to see people out riding bikes and driving old or classic cars around town?

If you like to "visit" with people, stroll around, grab a park bench or bring a couple chairs and just talk with people you meet. I think they would strike up conversation and enjoy meeting people with t-shirts advertising businesses or hobbies so they know you are a "local." Come out is you can talk abot the red hat society, VFW, American Legion, Lions Club, or any other area group.

Let's make them feel welcome and encourage their return for our special events (or maybe return with their business!).

Everyone is welcome to all the events. Watch for the schedules in the Observer and at the information booth in Union. Y'all come. 'Nuff said!

Sue Briggs, Union Hospitality Committee, Union

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Once again recently I heard and have heard of people griping bitterly about what they view as raw treatment by police officers.

Any American who gripes vehemently about bullies with badges obviously has no idea how law enforcement is administered in various places overseas.

In America when you see someone running down a street, most people stand around gawking, whereas in some countries pedestrians hit the pavement and stay there knowing that bullets could be flying any second. And if you do get hit, tough luck! You're not even allowed to sue. I certainly do not encourage it, but only in America can you spit on a cop and not get shot on the spot.

Some grievances against individual police officers are legitimate. However when you wear a uniform that's all John and Jane Q. Public see. When one looks good, everyone looks good. When one looks bad... Even police will tell you it's never the badge but the person wearing it who makes the difference.

So unless you truly have a grievance, why not seek out a police man or woman in your community, introduce yourself and ask what you can do to help.

Remember they can't help you unless you help them. And above all remember, united we stand, divided we fall.

Only in America.

Ron R. Fischer, Elgin

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For the past three weeks news sources have announced that gas prices have fallen.

First, the drop was eight cents a gallon, then 11 cents a gallon and this week 21 cents a gallon, all from three weeks ago.

Yesterday TV news said the average price of gas across the nation was $2.77 cents a gallon. It seems strange that gas moguls in Union County have not heard that news yet.

Roy Hills, Island City

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For 364 days a year, Union County, even Oregon, seems a million miles and a world or two away from Manhattan.

Monday that distance will disappear.

It will be the fifth anniversary of the terrorist hijackings of planes from East Coast airports. Two of the hijacked planes were crashed into the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan. One plane was flown into one of the sides of the Pentagon. A final plane, thought to be intended for the White House, crashed landed in a Pennsylvania field.

Where were you that morning?

It is a question Americans have asked themselves time and again.

My great-grandparents sometimes talked about where they were when they heard the Titanic had been lost, in 1912, and the number of people aboard her.

My grandparents always vividly remember Dec. 7, 1941, and the bombing of Pearl Harbor. My Midwestern family all talk about the radio news that day, and whose radio they were listening to.

My grandmother usually adds her story about hearing that the war was over. My grandfather was in the service at that point, and she wanted him home.

For my parents' generation, the day to always be remembered is the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. My mother was teaching that day, my father driving a long-haul truck.

That's about the time my memories start. I don't remember the assassination, but I have strong visual memory of being 3, and sitting cross-legged, absorbed in the black-and-white TV images of the president's funeral.

Before Sept. 11, 2001, I had hoped that for my generation, the strongest memory would be the explosion after the launch of the Challenger space shuttle, and the loss of Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher in space.

It wasn't to be.

As the editorial cartoon say, "with us always."

There are people in Union County on this anniversary who were in New York City that day. There are people here who spent frantic hours wondering if relatives were OK. And there we all were, wondering how our world was going to change.

I was in my mother's home, a matter of amazing coincidence I've always been grateful about. Where would there have been a greater sense of safety that morning?

My husband and I were supposed to be boarding an airplane just a few hours later when the smoke rising off the first tower came on television. I think we were cleaning up and having breakfast as the "Today" show drifted through from the living room.

The larger meanings of what had happened took awhile to sink it. I was, I admit, pretty consumed that day with wondering how to get home to Oregon from Minnesota.

But throughout that day and the next several, the pictures from New York were seered into America.

Everyone has thoughts about what has happened since that day. Life has changed, from tiny details — computer records of what we check out at the library are now considered protected privacy records — to large ways with U.S. troops still in Afghanistan and Iraq and the general knowledge that the government can listen, if it wants, to every phone call you've made.

Who could have imaged Sept. 11, 2001, before it happened? The imagination staggers at what a new "date to remember" would have to be.

Stop sometime Monday and remember. Say a prayer. Watch a bird fly by. Say an extra "thank you" for some service. Light a candle. Try to say something nice to everyone you meet. Hug someone in your family.

Remember how suddenly life can change and never again be quite the same.

T.L. Petersen is a reporter for The Observer.

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I was visiting with a friend who insisted that humanity was doomed. Rationality, he asserted would never save us, since things like love and war are not rational things.

I found myself in the awkward position of feeling like I had to defend rationality as a cure to mankind's impending doom. Under the circumstances, this set me up to appear to be arguing against at least one positive — love. And hence the classic rebuff of cold rationality, or the cold calculation of interests.

The point I was unable to make at the time is this, that while mankind is often irrational in social dealings, with both desirable and doomsday consequences, there is still room for pragmatic strategies to separate the baby from the bath water.

There will always be some things that cannot be understood. This will trouble us in degrees and we will protect our functioning with fortified beliefs and theories. Provided our beliefs and theories do no active injustice to some other group of people this is a great adaptive strategy.

However, the human tragedy that simply will not go away is this, that our beliefs and selectively reinforced theories are often not without consequences, and further, they get applied to all manner of things that could be rationally understood if we simply had the tools and tenacity to handle the complexity.

I will be the first to admit that we are a species that is a victim of our own tribal success. We are not designed for the increasing levels of complexity and crowding that competition between survival units over the last 7,000 years continues to produce.

I will also concede the point of Biologists like Jared Diamond that exceeding carrying capacity' can be a significant contributor to war, especially if we make a list of all the ways that human ingenuity makes the concept of carrying capacity almost unrecognizable as a natural system.

There is no easy answer. Lots of people have historically struggled with the class of perennial problems of humanity that seem to become more ominous with time. On the one hand is a trajectory of increasing population combined with more and more lethal technologies. On the other hand is the trajectory of increased complexity and increased levels of alienation. It is not surprising that this looks like an eventually fatal combination of trajectories.

It is natural to hope for better leadership. But in an evolving circumstance where more and more peoples functioning is challenged by the realities of unavoidable complexities, something has to change at the grass roots. Any significant change for the better has to effect the functioning of humanity at large.

I will ask the question directly. Is there a place in our classrooms and our homes for a curriculum or strategy that is designed to help many more children cope wisely and effectively with the future that the two mentioned trajectories suggest i.e., the nexus of fiercer competition, more lethal technologies, mind numbing complexities, and radicalizing alienation?

Remarkably many of the skills that need to be taught each new generation really haven't changed. They just become increasingly more critical to our survival. Here are 12:

1. A Beloved's ability to introspect and thus learn from mistakes.

2. A Lover's commitment to empathize with all - especially personal adversaries. Know your enemies better than they know themselves.

3. A Skeptic's sense of the superficial.

4. A Scholar's suspicion of any lens, bias or agenda, tribal or otherwise

5. A Policeman's sense of the human capacity for dangerousness.

6. A Cooperator's sense of hard work.

7. A Soldier's sense of courage.

8. A Truth seekers respect for reason.

9. A Judge's sense of proportionality.

10. An Historian's sense of time frames.

11. A Pragmatist's sense of the possible.

12. A Problem Solver's appreciation for pencil and paper.

The last of these is probably requisite to the depth of the others, since they all have to do with getting below the surface of things.

Tools like mind mapping make it possible for more of us average folks to get below the surface enough to see the world like the occasional really wise person.

I hope this does not seem like cold rationality. It feels like a much fuller connectedness to me. Let's call it "warm rationality." It is not based on wallowing in our inadequacies and impending doom, but being realistic about our circumstances, our limitations, the known trajectories, and doing what we can to learn and practice the needed skills.

David Waln lives in Summerville.