Letters to the editor for June 11

Standing with Black Lives Matter

The senseless deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Manuel Ellis, and so many other black lives in our country have sparked understandable anger, frustration, and anguish. The systematic oppression and racism we are witnessing today is not new; it has been present in our country for hundreds of years.

The Thurston County Chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) wishes to communicate our firm support of black communities as they grieve, stand up for their rights, and protest peacefully to bring about substantive change to our law enforcement and justice systems. NOW’s goals include leading societal change and eliminating discrimination. We stand firm in these goals and wish to work with black communities, local elected officials, and local non-profit organizations to eradicate racism and elevate the voices of people of color.

It is our sincere hope that through unity in these times, we can achieve equity and justice in our community moving forward.

Sharon Guile, President, Thurston County NOW, Olympia

The right to life itself

I recently drove up to Tacoma to see a hospitalized patient, and the precautions I took (prolonged handwashing, donning full PPE, with my N95 mask and face shield, and meticulously attending to the manner in which I did so) allowed that patient to remain safe from me, were I to have been infected with COVID-19 and not yet known it.

The care I and my colleagues take to protect our patients stands in stark contrast to the behavior of the roughly 2,000 people protesting who I saw upon my return to Olympia. I could not see one protective mask being worn at all, and the folks were really cramming together, to protest the “shelter in place” order of Gov. Inslee.

The gap between the reality of me and my colleagues trying, really hard, to prevent the spread of a contagious and fatal disease (and its progress throughout the land anyway), and this witless display of whining about the impact of the preventive public health measures taken on their “freedoms” was surreal and stark.

They want the freedom to “go back to work”? My patients want freedom from the infection they seem so willing to spread. The number of predicted deaths from COVID-19 have been revised upwards to 134,000 deaths through August (we have already reached 112,000), and the reason for that change is the premature relaxing of shelter-in-place rules, and a failed federal containment program. Perhaps they could direct their attention to those failures, instead of threatening the right to life of their fellow citizens.

Timothy D. Murphy, MD, Olympia

Pete Kmet, the public servant

So, recently I went out on a constitutional. Lo and behold, what do I see on Linwood Avenue but Tumwater Mayor Pete Kmet in a raggedy sweatshirt with a manual grabber, picking up thrown-away trash, putting it in a trash bag, and depositing it in his truck. All by his lonesome. It didn’t look like any political stunt.

I know Pete from my Department of Ecology days. He’s really a good guy with no political ambitions as far as I’ve ever observed. He seems to just see himself as a public servant.

Whether or not you live in Tumwater, give him a shoutout.

Bernard Brady, Tumwater