Town of Hilton Head Island enhances safety | Letters

The last few days the Island Packet had stories I must respond to.

1. The Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office substation on Hilton Head Island is a good investment. They are sworn officers with arrest powers and firearms, and are on the island. The county is large, so covering all areas is difficult. Private communities do have security but not the same as a deputy. I live in Sea Pines and our security is great but I am glad we also have the substation available to help.

2. My next issue is funding salaries for Town of Hilton Head Island Fire Rescue workers. An increase in salary is needed. I have used this group a few times and am very impresses with the operation and staff. Affordable housing is an issue. I understand as I came from Charles County, Md., near Washington, DC. Washington has the same problem as the staff can’t afford to live in the city and drive for hours to get to work.

I am the widow of a D.C. police member. One son is retired DCFD captain the other an active battalion chief. When in Maryland I served on the Board of Public Safety. I interviewed and hired deputies, and also did promotions. I also served on the Board of Fire and Rescue. We did the budget and the OK for buying apparatus and building firehouses.

Public safety should be high on every priority list.

Nancy Sefton Eldridge

Hilton Head Island

Trump wrong on virus testing

The current occupier of the White House says repeatedly that we have more cases of COVID-19 than anybody in the world because we do more testing. He says if we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases.

Using that logic, there would be a lot fewer cases of breast cancer if women would only stop getting mammograms.

This guy is not only a lying, corrupt narcissist but, in the reported words of his first Secretary of State, he’s a “moron.”

Beverly Leick

Hilton Head Island

Try to picture enslavement

I am a resident of Sun City. While living here, I keep busy partly by mowing a few neighbors’ lawns. Because the lawns must be maintained, the government has labeled me “essential.” I plan my daily schedule around the lawn care ... essentially making my own hours. So when the sun and humidity have teamed to work me over for a few hours, I return to the air conditioning and rest in the house.

Then one day I happened to picture the slaves of yore ... laboring all day long in the brutal temperatures and drenching their clothing with sweat and pretty much hating life.

I challenge you folks out there to imagine yourselves in the shoes of the enslaved. Seems their masters treated their dogs and horses with greater care. Man, oh man, do I feel blessed.

Bill Smith

Sun City

Offices closed, but tourism open?

The first article that caught my attention today concerned the massive amounts of money that chambers of commerce in South Carolina are spending to promote more tourism during this period of rising infections of the coronavirus.

The next article states that Beaufort County offices are closing to the public.

Come on, people, if government employees are not safe for exposure to the general public, how can we invite more tourism to our shores?

Town and county leaders need to stop this ridiculous spending immediately. How about spending that money on PPE for all the businesses that will remain open, instead of wasting it on tourism promotion?

Richard Dextraze

Hilton Head Island

Thanks to longtime Hilton Head writer from island Gullah

I delayed sending this letter in recognition of David Lauderdale’s retirement because I was waiting in hopes of him changing his mind. It appears he won’t, so I join the countless others in recognizing him for his contribution to our community via his words on paper and conversations along the way.

For more than 40 years he has been a part of Hilton Head Island’s fabric through his writings from various perspectives. His quiet demeanor and keen sense for “nosing” around and getting the “real” story showed in his writings.

Many favorite articles date to the days the Packet was really our “local” newspaper with a focus primarily on “local news and issues.” We will miss David’s writings on island characters, families, groups, events, activities and nature, which are, in my opinion, still the essence of why our island is so special to all of us.

As a native Gullah, I can say that David has a genuine desire to better understand and appreciate us, our culture, and our concerns. His understanding and appreciation of our community provided him a better platform to help educate others about the often “overlooked and forgotten” of our “beloved” island.

A late friend, Jonathan Daniels, told me that, “writers never retire, people just stop reading what they write.” I don’t think that will be the case for David. I encourage him to keep writing. Some of us will read it. David, thank you for coming here, staying, and for making this your home, too.

Morris C. Campbell

Hilton Head Island

GOP a disaster on the coronavirus

Unbelievable. Mike Pence came to South Carolina recently to join Gov. Henry McMaster in telling us that it is safe to send our children to school. He repeated something he has been saying for months, that we are in a “better place.”

But the fact is that the U.S. death toll is climbing, and in recent weeks South Carolina has been one of the worst places in the world for skyrocketing new infections.

Meanwhile, McMaster seems to think that the virus only spreads in bars after 11 p.m.

Does anyone still believe that public health should be optional?

Other Gazette letter-writers have said that COVID-19 should not be a partisan issue. I agree. But our president has made it a partisan issue by insisting that those loyal to him pretend the virus is under control. It is not.

Six months into the pandemic we still do not have a national plan, adequate supplies, or an honest assessment from the White House of what needs to be done. Any other president, Republican or Democratic, would have had those things long ago.

Instead, the Grim Reaper-In-Chief has decided to bypass the CDC, presumably in order to hide crucial virus information from the American public. It’s bad for health, bad for the economy, bad for education.

We can’t all hold our breath until November.

Palmira Brummett

Beaufort

Time to take the nation back

It’s time that the silent majority, whether Republican or Democratic, to take back our streets, monuments, memorials and our country from the anarchists, snowflakes and extremists who are destroying our great country.

It’s time for us to stand up for what is right and what is wrong. It is your right to peacefully protest, but no one’s right to riot, loot, occupy, paint and destroy public and private property and statues.

It is not their right to demand changing the names of anything. Or their right to force their will upon any other person. Or their right to defund the police. Or to destroy and burn any private, public or federal building. It is not their right to injure other persons, whether it be a police officer, soldier or a private citizen. They should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

It is time that we all stand up, politicians and citizens alike, for our laws, statutes and Constitution.

We cannot let the extreme left control our streets and country. We need to be held accountable to the majority of our citizens who are disgusted and outraged at what is happening.

It’s time to demand that our national, state, county and local elected leaders uphold the laws and principles of this great country. Demand that all lives matter and put an end to this lawlessness once and for all.

It is time for us to create a movement to take this country back! It’s time now!

Tom Reynolds

Bluffton

Beware the federal presence

We lived in Israel in the 1960s. Many of our to-be lifelong friends served in the Haganah and the War of Independence.

On their behalf, we want to thank House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for her heads-up to the Jewish residents of Portland, warning that the federal law officers sent to defend federal buildings are storm troopers.

Or, have our politics devolved from reasonable disagreement to pure hatred?

Don and Wendy Kennedy

Hilton Head Island

America safe with Joe Biden

Hearing the lies of President Donald Trump has become fatiguing.

Here is one more lie that needs to be publicly corrected. In a campaign ad that is airing locally on television, Donald Trump claims that Joe Biden wants to defund police and your children will not be safe if Joe Biden is elected.

The truth was published on June 10, in Forbes, “Joe Biden definitively declared, ‘I do not support defunding police.’”

Biden proposes additional funding to police to “reinvigorate community policing.” Biden believes police departments need to institute reforms to rid them of racism, and he supports officers getting back on the streets to build relationships with people in the community. These practices have been effective in other communities.

Mamas, your children are safe with Joe Biden as our leader.

Your children are more at-risk with Trump, who wants to send them back to school with a highly contagious and lethal virus ravaging our country as a result of his lack of national leadership. And, yes, children do contract the virus, they can spread it, and they can die from it. Protect your babies (and grandbabies) with masks, hand washing and social distancing.

Barbara B. Ernico

Hilton Head Island

They’re more than ‘protesters’

Many of the so-called protesters in Seattle and Portland are also anarchists. Why does The Island Packet limit its description of these people to “protesters”? Are they not by their words and actions also anarchists, criminals or vandals? They are participants in lawless chaos. Do the editors of the Packet not understand the difference between a peaceful protester and a criminal?

Warren Jungk

Bluffton

Congress is what needs defunding

Over the past months we have watched police brutality with the killing of George Floyd, the rise of Black Lives Matter, followed by rioting and looting, killing police officers, all to the chant “Defund the Police.”

Last month I wrote that, yes, the police system needs an overhaul, which will require more money, not less.

But now the cry really should be “Defund Congress!”

What is Congress, both houses included, doing? Nothing! A total waste.

The congressmen and and senators spend between $2 billion and $2.5 billion a year of our tax dollars ... and for what? Nothing but political banter and personal enrichment.

Enough already. We should as concerned Americans call for the defunding and banishment of Congress. We don’t need them.

Keep the Constitution and turn the laws of the land over to the states to accept, modify or remove. Each state should be autonomous. If the country needs to declare a war, the governors of each state can cast a vote, and majority rules.

As for “we the people,” if you don’t like the laws of your state, stop whining and protesting. Move to a state that agrees with your point of view.

Michael McNally

Callawassie Island

Rise in protest, but peacefully

I want to add my heartfelt thanks and appreciation to John Lewis. The non-violent movement initiated by Martin Luther King Jr., and supported by men like Lewis and C.T. Vivian, was a primary reason there was no “black vigilante” uprising in the U.S. in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s.

I was 15 when 14-year-old Emmett Till was kidnapped, tortured, shot, and thrown in the river.

When I was a senior at Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas, President Eisenhower sent the101st Airborne Division to desegregate the school of 2,000 with nine black students. In the early ’60s (my 20s), three freedom riders were murdered and buried in a dam; four young Black girls were killed in the bombing of their church; Medgar Evers was assassinated; countless nonviolent, demonstrators were beaten, hosed and gassed; and on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

These Black lives mattered then and matter today. We cannot let the few “thugs” take over the nonviolent protests today that all these civil rights pioneers died to ensure.

Change, not chaos, was their goal; and it is ours to take up today. May they all rest in peace as we bow down in repentance and rise up in nonviolent protest. 2 Chronicles 7:14.

Ken Reinhardt

Bluffton

This story was originally published July 30, 2020 at 8:53 PM.