To the editor:
I’m just asking.
I am an 80-year-old wife, mother, grandmother and great-grandmother who has had two open heart surgeries, but in otherwise good health, with the exception that now the doctors are telling me that my heart is not getting enough blood to work properly, and so, by the time you read this I will have had my aortic valve replaced. My doctors tell me I could have another 10-15 yrs. of productive life. The other day, a 73-year-old friend who has been struggling with the same type of problem told me that she hopes she can have the operation before 2014, because after that Medicare will no longer pay for this for someone over the age of 75. If this is true, what will her doctors tell her?
When our youngest daughter decided she and her boyfriend should skip school one day and do who knows what, I intercepted them and took her to Planned Parenthood, where they educated her about all kinds of things that, when I tried to explain to her, she thought “I just didn’t understand.”  Today she is happily married with two children of her own. If Planned Parenthood is gutted or dismantled, and you are a single parent, too shy or embarrassed or “just don’t understand,” who will your teenager turn to when those hormones start to rage? Don’t tell them to “just say no.” I’ve learned that parents are just old fogies that have never been where the teenager is. Planned Parenthood doesn’t do abortions, but they do educate.
If you’ve been a stay-at-home parent and homemaker all your adult life and suddenly find yourself a single person, living on a small pension/Social Security and are given a voucher to go find medical insurance, will you know how or be able to afford good coverage? Suppose Social Security, as we know it, is abolished? How will you survive?
If teachers are cut, class sizes increased and Pell Grants abolished, how many of our young people will be even be qualified or able to afford to go to college? Who in this country will do the research into cures for various diseases?
If a person wants to be president of a country, why would they invest their money in a foreign country? Do they really want to be president or do they just want to sit in the chair?
Can anyone explain to me what is legitimate rape? What happened to common sense?
Only watching Fox News or CNN or WSNBC cannot provide the answers to these questions. We as a United States owe it to ourselves and to the nation as a whole to find factual answers to these things. Please, before casting a vote in November, get all the education you can about these important issues that affect all of us.
We do not always agree with each other and that is okay. It is not a matter of what church you attend or who you love or what color your skin is. We are our brother’s keepers.
– Dolores A. Zeese, Tryon