Shame on officials

To the Editor:

Shame on the Martin County commissioners who feel the county should not financially support the Martin County Veterans Memorial that is going to be constructed on donated land. It appears to me you do not understand that these men and women have served, are serving, and many who have died fighting for our great nation so we are able to live in a free country.

Mr. Flohrs, your comment regarding it being a slap in the face to your people without polling them, I think, is a slap in the face to them and all veterans.

And Mr. Mahoney, regarding your comment about the Historical Society being for everyone is true, but only a small percentage of residents utilize it, while the Martin County Veterans Memorial will be a tribute to all those who made our history possible. (Don’t get me wrong, the Historical Society/Museum is a wonderful facility with a lot of history). If this Veterans Memorial was only for Fairmont veterans, I could perhaps better understand your position as county commissioners, but it is for all Martin County veterans.

Thank you, Mr. Schmidtke, for your stance on financially supporting the memorial and my hope is the rest of the commissioners will see the light and vote yes to financially support this tribute to the men and women who served and are serving our great country.

God Bless the USA.

Roger Voss

Fairmont

More memorials?

To the Editor:

You can’t open a paper or watch TV without someone or some organization wanting or constructing another memorial. As a society, I believe we’ve memorialized just about everything you could imagine.

Dead people, dead groups of people, dead animals, dead species, even dead civilizations. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a memorial to something.

Now we have another memorial to think about. Forget about already having two veteran memorial sites in Fairmont (Veterans Park and Citizens Park), lets get another one. There seems to be a growing notion that if we don’t put up a monument, then no one will remember whatever it is that’s being memorialized.

If individual citizens chose to donate money to this latest veterans memorial, then so be it. But when taxpayers’ dollars are spent on a private venture such as the half-million dollar monument being constructed at Winnebago Avenue in Fairmont, that’s where we should draw the line.

In a rush to show how patriotic we all are, we seem to have thrown common sense out the window. If our elected officials are so intent on spending money on veterans, maybe they should concentrate on helping the thousands of living veterans and their families through donations to the various veteran organizations, instead of constructing memorials to the veterans that have passed. It seems to me that it’s not the size of our monuments that measure our patriotism … rather, the size of our hearts.

Bill Christianson

Fairmont