To the editor:
We as a nation need to start remembering the past and learning from it. During Great Depression, President Roosevelt had some ideas and he had programs that gave people back their pride. He was not giving them money but letting them work for it. It also gave the people in need a way to survive in those troubled times. We now face troubled times; when it will end no one really knows, but there are those in need — the elderly, the poor and the disabled who will desperately need help in the coming months. I call on the state, county and towns to set up programs like they had in Mr. Roosevelt’s time — road gangs to pick up along side the roads, patch highways and road ways, under the supervision of transportation road bosses to minor state construction to revitalize old homes of those in need, to cutting firewood in rural areas to help meet the heating needs of the elderly and the poor and disabled, to manufacturing wood and other material burning stoves to provide warmth.
When ever there is economic trouble, homeless numbers go up and so do their death due to sleeping outside in the winter night. A few month’s ago, I proposed that we use some of the military bases which are closed or being closed still in the hands of the Department of Defense within the United States to become training centers and also provide shelter for those in training and their families. These centers would bring those in the blue collar working class who have lost their jobs and in some cases their homes into the 21st century with training in the new technologies and the new manufacturing areas.
I am sure that the government and the state and county and come up with even more ideas to retrain and give those blue collar workers the new tools and skills to survive in the new century and provide the new jobs that they can get and be proud of.
Ashland
