Great festival
Dear Editor:
We would like to thank the hundreds of donors and dozens of volunteers and many sponsors and artists who helped make the 20th annual Methow Valley Chamber Music Festival our most successful program ever.
We had record attendance with more than 1,000 people attending the main stage festival concerts, record sales of art by our local artists, and the Fellowship Quartet gave free concerts at five separate venues to overflowing crowds.
After last year’s hiatus, we are back bigger and better than ever and looking forward to next year.
Sandy Mackie, President, Methow Valley Chamber Music Festival board of directors
The nature of war
Dear Editor:
The Vietnam War remains a complicated and controversial part of American history. There is the perspective of those who were there, and there is the perspective of recollection and history. All provide a piece of the truth. However, there should be no room for sarcasm or name calling in the discussion.
To Tom Larson and Jack Berg: although you may not have seen My Lai, that does not mean that the massacre, and others like it, did not occur, or that the picture of the young, naked woman, wrapped in flames, on the cover of Life magazine did not also occur, many times over.
Intelligent people know that war is horrible. Atrocities occur on all sides. That is the nature of war. My father led troops onto Normandy, and he refused to talk about it. After I saw Saving Private Ryan, I understood.
For a good perspective on the war, read Bright and Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan or The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien (both were there).
Few nobly “answered the call to arms,” as Berg suggests. Poor, largely uneducated, and mostly very young black men were drafted. They were ill prepared to fight a guerilla war against an enemy defending their homeland. These men deserve our compassion, just as their government deserves our condemnation for sending them to Vietnam. Scores of homeless vets fill the streets of Seattle, because their government failed to acknowledge or treat the PTSD that destroyed their lives.
The war ended because Americans could not stomach the real cost in dollars and in lives. Battle scenes televised into American living rooms with the evening news and pictures of rows of flag-draped coffins soured America’s will to fight a war few could tolerate or justify.
If you visit Vietnam now, you will find a dynamic country full of young people who have put the war behind them. When you ask how they can be so welcoming to Americans, given our history, they will tell you: the United States was in their country for less time than any other invaders, and, they will say, “we (the Vietnamese) won the war.”
Julianne Seeman, Mazama
Violation of rights
Dear Editor:
The Kleins, a Christian couple who owned a bakery in Oregon, were recently fined $135,000 by an Oregon labor commissioner for “emotional damages” at an administrative law hearing (not a trial) for supposedly violating an Oregon statute by refusing to bake a cake for a lesbian couple’s wedding.
The lesbian couple had been customers of the Kleins in the past, but were offended when the Kleins refused to bake a cake for the lesbian couple’s wedding. At the time the Kleins refused, same-sex marriage was illegal in Oregon, so how could the Kleins have broken any laws? The Kleins’ refusal was based on their Christian belief that marriage is defined by God as being between a man and a woman, and the Kleins viewed baking the wedding cake as violating that belief.
Last time I checked, we still have religious freedom in this country and Americans are free to support (or boycott) whatever business they choose for whatever reason they choose. So why were the Kleins targeted, driven out of business, receiving death threats, and fined an outrageous amount for refusing to bake a wedding cake? Was the Klein’s bakery the only bakery that could do the job? I don’t think so. It is obvious to me this whole thing was more about demanding that Christians accept same-sex marriage than it was about baking a cake.
I am not a homophobe, or whatever the latest politically correct word is. I have worked with and have in our family homosexual individuals. Although I disagree with their choice of lifestyle, I do not condemn the person. However, demanding that a business owner or individual abandon their deeply held religious belief in order to comply with a customer’s request is a violation of our right as American citizens to freedom of religion.
Chrystal Perrow, Winthrop
