Letters to the Editor: A plea for Mitch McConnell. Seek truth over politics.
Plea to Senator McConnell
I am so frustrated with Sen. Mitch McConnell controlling legislation that comes from the House by not allowing consideration in the Senate. He is blocking essential bills. He’s been in office since 1985. I know he is keenly aware of how our democracy is supposed to work. I sincerely hope he will begin representing me by stopping the partisan politics and taking a serious look at our nation’s security. We depend on him as a representative to be honest and objective as the impeachment query moves forward.
Please, senator, be a hero in this dark hour in our country. Seek truth over politics. Our very democracy is at stake. I know deep down he genuinely used to place country and Kentucky first. Of late, I watch McConnell as he doesn’t challenge the breakdown of our democratic norms.
Climate change is a reality. Please, senator, stop placing self-interest ahead of the responsibility for the future. It’s not my future, nor his. McConnell needs to start representing our democracy, not the National Rifle Association, and not partisan politics.
Mary McCready, Richmond
Remembering UK’s Beck
I was saddened to learn of the death of University of Kentucky basketball standout Ed Beck last month. Ed Beck and his wife Faye have a special place in my heart. As many longtime UK fans know, Ed passed up an opportunity to play pro basketball to attend seminary. As a youth in Decatur, Georgia, I was powerfully affected by Ed’s preaching in a revival in my home church, Patillo Memorial Methodist.
Years later I was deeply moved by A Love to Live By, Ed’s account of the loss of his first wife, Billie, during his junior year at UK — still a book worth reading.
Fast forward to the 1990s when Ed was pastoring Sunrise United Methodist Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and serving as chaplain of the Air Force Academy football team. While at a conference in town, Ed and his second wife, Faye, graciously invited me and my wife to an Air Force football game.
Over the years I have mailed Ed UK sports books, one on his friend Cawood Ledford just this year. Anyone who ever heard Ed Beck preach remembers it as surely as anyone who ever saw him score and rebound for Coach Adolph Rupp’s Fiddlin’ Five.
Mark R. Elliott, Wilmore
Putin threatens democracy
In the 1980s, Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev revoked the long cold war with the United States. He urged co-existence, cooperation, a reduction in the arms race, even limited capitalism in Russia. The breakup of the old USSR resulted in several new independent nations. However, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rise to power reversed those changes and led to a revival of the old Stalinist/KGB policies and a new push by an aggressive Russia into the Baltics, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and even the western hemisphere.
Although Putin’s economy floundered, his intelligence operatives and cyber warriors excelled, even sowing chaos by disruption, division, and the discrediting of the U.S. and western democracies. Using torture, nerve gas, assassination of critics, crushing the press, and creating false news on the Internet, Putin gained a new influence throughout the world. Western security analysts estimate that two-thirds of all Russian embassies are staffed by his intelligence officers. Alarmingly, a new fascism is thriving in the Western world. Only the United States ignores this peril to western democracy.
Henry Everman, Richmond
Nurse practitioners can fill need
Demand for mental health services is rapidly increasing due to many factors, most notably an escalating substance-use crisis and alarming rates of suicide. Despite this, more than 75 percent of U.S. counties – including Jefferson and Fayette counties – face a shortage of mental health workers.
There is a solution. Psychiatric-mental health nurses have the skills and qualifications to expand access to quality mental health care – we just need more of them.
As a psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioner who provides mental health and substance use care in Louisville, I want to raise awareness for this career option.
Psychiatric-mental health nurses are educated, clinically trained, and licensed to provide a wide range of care and treatment to those with mental health and substance use needs. Those of us who are licensed as advanced practice psychiatric-mental health nurses can even prescribe medication and provide psychotherapy.
Kathy Edelen Brotzge, Louisville