As a health-care worker providing services to the elderly and dying, I am eager for the Glendale Nursing Home to provide a new facility to match the high standard of care they provide their residents.
A new facility in this area would enhance the lives of so many of our residents, where they can be given quality care and a place to spend their last days that offer them comfort, safety and dignity.
The present facility is in need of significant repair and renovation. When I attended the recent town meeting, I heard story after story from facility residents and their families, county residents, Glendale staff, physicians and many others about the excellent care received at Glendale, and the very serious need for a new facility.
I saw people gathered as community, caring about the sometimes “lost and forgotten.” I was touched by their compassion and vision for a place that would provide the highest quality care in a state-of-the art facility where everyone wins and no one loses, especially our elderly, frail and sick. A vision of a place that we may one day have available for our loved ones, or maybe even ourselves. A vision of a place where there is always room for one more so that no one is forced to leave the area to die surrounded by strangers because there was no bed in Schenectady.
Please think about what you really want for the future of Schenectady, the future of those who have given so much to us. We can’t say no to them. We owe them so much!
Karen Horton, RN
Schenectady
The writer is supervisor for patient care at Community Hospice of Schenectady.
I was very disappointed in the results of the survey about legalizing marijuana. Seventy percent of the people who voted wanted to legalize it.
Who would want to be on the road with intoxicated people? Every time a person uses marijuana, they are intoxicated. There are a great deal of unsafe drivers on the road now; can you imagine if they legalize marijuana? I say a prayer of thanks every day that I get home safely.
Marijuana is not safe. It is cultivated to be more potent and it may be cut with all kinds of harmful chemicals. According to the National Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Drug Information, “Long-term users of cannabis may develop psychological dependence and require more of the drug to get the same effect. The drug can become the center of their lives.” Marijuana can change your sense of time and space. The distortion of reality can be so severe that a person could suffer a panic attack.
Children in our communities would be exposed to secondhand marijuana smoke in their homes and cars. The secondhand smoke from marijuana would cause intoxication and many health problems.
The smoked form of marijuana has no supported medical use in the United States. The American Medical Association, the National Cancer Institute, American Cancer Society and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society do not support the smoked form of marijuana as medicine.
Betsy Reksc
Johnstown
The writer is a prevention educator for Hamilton-Fulton-Montgomery Prevention Council.
How many police does it take to silence the voice of the American people? We do not as yet know, but Sen. Max Baucus of Montana wishes to add many more simply to assure that they do not even have to consider the only health care plan that would work well.
Why is the Senate not even considering the single-payer health plan, but snidely laughing behind closed doors as they prepare to put another one over on the American people? When are we going to say “enough,” like the French people recently did when their government tried to make them pay for the government’s own ineptness and bad management? Is there not one person who is still a vertebrate in this country?
Last week, the Senate Finance Committee thought it a hilarious joke as they ejected one activist after another because they protested that not even one spokesperson for single-payer health care was permitted to sit at the hearing table. Freedom of speech? Equal representation? Now it is my turn to laugh.
Let us stop cowering. Let us take this country back. Down with wimpy, mewling American citizens. Start drinking your V8, everyone!
C. Alfred Santillo
Sharon Springs
Re May 10 article, “What’s next? Marriage benefits for bigamists and polygamists?” by Daniel T. Weaver: When I read this article online at 4 a.m. on May 10, all I could think of is that the basic premise on which Daniel is basing his Op-ed piece is flawed.
I think the piece is very well written and makes a great many good points, especially about the motives of Gov. Paterson. Even though the governor had mentioned proposing a same-sex marriage law when he first entered office and his public approval polls were high, it now seems the governor’s motives stem from more recent poll results. Regardless of the governor’s past or present motivation, a same-sex marriage law is still the right idea.
However, Daniel’s premise that bigamists and polygamists are being discriminated against in the same ways as gays is flawed in that the former are not denied the right to marry one person under state law, while the latter — gays — are denied that right.
If bigamists and polygamists want to marry multiple partners of the same sex, then by extension of Daniel’s premise, you could say bigamists and polygamists have an issue, albeit belief-based rather than legal. But it would not be that they are being denied the same rights others enjoy under the present marriage law or even a same-sex marriage law.
The premise of the same-sex marriage law is one person marrying another regardless of sexual orientation, to make gays equal under the state law and able to take advantage of the right that already exists for opposite-sex couples.
David A. Freedgood
Schenectady
I’m glad I’m not the insurance underwriter for Fred Colabello, owner of Fred’s Stump and Tree Removal, or his client (May 5 Gazette photo). The lack of safety apparel is astonishing for the work he appears to be engaged in.
Consider: Eye protection, (visible) ear protection, gloves (finger cots, perhaps — or maybe no fingers left to protect), sleeves, hard hat, fall-protection gear (he appears to be in an elevated location).
[These are] all very basic measures recommended and practiced by professional arborists, blathered about ad infinitum by litigation-wary chainsaw manufacturers, generally mandated by numerous regulators, and not altogether too bad an idea — at least some.
You never know when someone’s going to snap your picture, plaster it on the front page, and engrave it into the minds of the many.
C.D. Snyder
Niskayuna
The ban on trans fats by Albany County and New York City [May 8 Gazette] may deserve a hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court. The court might see a violation of individual rights by such governmental edicts.
In the first place, no citizen is compelled to eat what may be unhealthy food. If this small matter is not cleared up, then the rest of life’s common risky behaviors could be legislated out of business — smoking, alcohol drinking, driving (exhaust fumes can cause asthma), eating meat, sex (“This could lead to overpopulation on a shrinking planet”), etc.
The traditional way of dealing with such potential dangers is to put warning labels on suspected products. The logical end of banning questionable products is to ban life — or at least the freedom to think for oneself. Thus, the underlying issue — about which the court is always vigilant — is the potential tyranny of governments.
David Childs
Johnstown
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