Speakout 3/19

Tuesday, March 19, 2002

Call 471-6636

I live in East Prairie and would like to know what is going on with our city. They have a current crusade for citywide cleanup. Citizens are being fined for limbs, junk, tires and messes in general, which is great. This needs to be done, however you cannot pick and choose who you want to go after. You can fine the first person but not the second person. The same is going on with city stickers and water bills. Some citizens are left alone and others are gone after. There is no order to how they are fined. If you don't have a city sticker and a certain city employee feels like picking you, then you are the next target. Laws are laws - no one should be exempt. If you turn off one person's water for an unpaid bill, all unpaid should be turned off. If the city of East Prairie wants a citywide cleanup, they should clean up their own mess on Short Street. They currently have a huge mess of gravel, concrete, dirt and piles of whatever. Grass has grown up around it and it is an eyesore. So, city of East Prairie, clean up your own back yard before you fault someone else's. All I ask is that all laws are practiced fairly. We have so many more problems with law and order that need attended to: Teen-age drinking and driving, horrible drug problem, using our city streets as a dragstrip and a curfew that is not enforced are just a few problems where a great crusade needs to be launched. Closing our doors and not talking about it because it doesn't affect us directly is not the answer.

I sure hate to see Kmart go out of business because I do most of my shopping there. Maybe the city should try to get a factory in there so people can work. Sikeston is building more and more banks - one on every two blocks. I wonder why. Who is making all the money to put in them? Unemployment in Sikeston is high and there's nowhere for people to work. It looks like most of us are going to have to leave this area to work.

I am calling about the Sikeston Rodeo. We were down a few years back and had a few problems and we thought maybe they would get back with us, but haven't. My wife had cancer at that time and had lost all of her hair and wore a baseball cap. I think the Sikeston Jaycees and Police Department were very rude to her. There was a big altercation with a couple of the Jaycees' daughters making fun of her. They had called her a few names and stuff like that and she told the girls it isn't nice to make fun of a sick person. The police officers told my wife to take her seat. She asked if she could go back and stand in the concession line where she was already at when this started and they told her no, that she would have to take her seat or they would escort her out. Those people treated her very unfairly. The Jaycees were contacted about this and we left our address, phone number and the whole bit. Nobody has tried to contact us. We are going to try to go to the rodeo again this year. We enjoy going to the rodeo and come from out of town, spend a lot of money and stay in a motel. We hope it all turns out OK this time.

I would like to put something good in SpeakOut for a change. We have the best paper boy around in Blodgett. Hat's off to him, and thank you!

I wonder how many people in the United States would be in agreement with me if we were to stop all TV, newspaper and radio reports coming out of Afghanistan and the prison we've got these people in. If these news people would just shut up and get out of the way, I feel that we could go in and do our business, and do it in a military manner, without feeling like someone is going to see and tell if we make a mistake. I'm curious as to how many people would agree with that policy. We tell everything we know. We tell our people, they tell their people. I know we have freedom of speech and all that, but we have men over there who are subject to death. We ought to just stay out of the way and let them do our thing and we should just get on with our lives.