Yes, masks are coming off, but vaccine and mask opponents in NC must beware

Vaccines, masks

So, the masks are going away. Fine, but know this: over 900,000 Americans have died of COVID and every single one caught the disease from someone else. Unvaccinated, unmasked people are a menace to the community, like drunk drivers and food service workers who don’t wash their hands after using the bathroom. Individual rights do not include the right to make other people sick.

Michael O’Hara, Mooresville

Healthcare

Regarding “Liberal agenda undermines employer-based health care,” (Feb 20 Opinion):

The op-ed from the Heritage Foundation writer would be comical if it weren’t so pitifully out-of-touch with the myriad of failures and inadequacies of today’s “private” health insurance.

Sure, let’s keep a healthcare system in which our choices are made by for-profit insurance companies with sky-high administrative costs and richly-paid executives, whose sole job is finding new ways to take in as much premium dollars as possible, while paying out the least benefits possible. What possibly can go wrong with that?

Mike Daisley, Charlotte

Medicare for All

The conservative think-tank author of this op-ed against universal healthcare insurance deliberately misstates the motives of those who support it. We want everyone to have insurance, including the millions who lost their insurance along with their jobs due to the pandemic. We want entrepreneurs who start small companies to have insurance. We want everyone to have free choice of doctors and hospitals, not just a choice of which bureaucratic insurance company will restrict those choices to maximize profits.

Medicare for All indeed might replace employer-based coverage with universal guaranteed, comprehensive, life-long coverage that will cost employees and employers less. Who wouldn’t want that?

George Bohmfalk, Charlotte

Unaffiliated voters

I read with interest “NC Republicans redraw congressional maps with Dems’ help” (Feb. 18), but where was the representation for unaffiliated voters? We unaffiliated voters make up approximately one third of the voters in North Carolina, yet we were not represented in this process. To be fair, redistricting maps should be drawn by a nonpartisan commission made up of people trained to do this work, not by political parties which seek only to hold onto or increase their political power.

Cheryl Milam, Concord

Putin and Trump

According to reports, Donald Trump considered having the Department of Defense seize state voting machines after his 2020 election loss. So, it’s no surprise that as Russia threatens the lives of millions of Ukrainian citizens, the one-term, twice impeached former president praised authoritarian dictator Vladimir Putin. There is nothing Republican or conservative about Trump. Republicans who continue to support him are supporting a man who would rip the Constitution to shreds if it guaranteed just one day back in the White House. Hopefully, the Republican Party can return to the party of Milton Friedman and Mitt Romney soon.

Gabriel Russ, Lincolnton

Climate changes

Now that virtually everyone on earth agrees the climate is changing, let’s get specific. It’s tough to argue that record-breaking natural disasters we see weekly aren’t happening, so climate deniers take a fallback position: Climate has always changed.

Remember when our parents and grandparents told us about the horrendous polar melt of 1929 or the record western drought of 1964? No, because those types of climate disasters never happened. But we can tell our children about the ongoing western drought that started in 2002, which threatens the welfare of tens of millions of Americans (as reported in The Observer last week).

Climate changes naturally over thousands of years, not over the span of one generation. But we now have just one generation to fix it.

Mark C. Taylor, Charlotte

Kinston High

Thank you for publishing the “Dreams and Nightmares” series on Kinston and the impact of basketball on the city. It was excellent journalism and made for compelling reading.

Steve Larson, Charlotte