Letters to the Editor
Shop local for the holidays
Dear Editor:
It’s the Holiday Season. Gift buying has started. My wife and I raised our two kids here in Mammoth, and they participated in nearly all local sports and other activities. Ski teams, AYSO soccer, swim team, little league, dance, scouts, etc. Both my wife and I have been members of local service clubs. All of these organizations help make this a real “community” and ALL OF THESE ORGANIZATIONS DEPEND ON THE GENEROUS DONATIONS OF MAMMOTH MERCHANTS AND SERVICE/TRADES PEOPLE.
During the Holiday Season our family tries to buy everything locally and support the very same people who so generously help our kids and others to make this a real “community.”
Certainly we make a run to Bishop or Reno for those things we can’t find here, but I urge all of our community, including all second homeowners who generously look for ways to support our community, to look first at buying your presents locally!
And this year will be more important than ever!
Be creative but whatever you do, buy local. Those same merchants/service and trades people are the folks our community depends on for donations all year! Happy Holidays!
Rick Liebersbach
Mammoth Lakes
Dickens more relevant than ever
Editor:
Charles Dickens is famed for his depiction of the hardships of the working class and the poor. His novels have a recurring theme of social reform and are fiercely critical of the stratification of Victorian society.
A political movement today with its abhorrence of welfare, the homeless (most of which are single mothers), unemployment benefits in terrible economic times, and a general negativity towards those who do not conform to their ideology, focuses instead on more wealth for the “haves and have mores,” as one president recently put it, that would make the compassion-less Ebenezer Scrooge proud.
In “A Christmas Carol,” Scrooge is a tight-fisted and greedy man who praises the workhouses and jails. Scrooge has only disgust for the poor thinking the world would be better off without them “decreasing the surface population.” When Scrooge’s fiance, Belle, releases him from their engagement, she exposes Scrooge’s dysfunctional personality disorder with, “You are much too fearful of the world.”
Belle’s chiding of the deteriorating Scrooge is a reminder of today’s mega-millionaire talk-radio pundits who masterfully know how to make fortunes with book sales and lucrative broadcasting contracts, preying on the personality disorders of their adherents who too easily fall victim to the oldest forms of control – guilt and fear.
I have yet to see this brilliant holiday classic presented by Mammoth Lakes Repertory Theatre as it is playing to sold-out audiences at the new Edison Theatre in the Mammoth Ski Museum. But I plan on not missing it.
The productions under the watch of Shira Dubrovner are a prime example of the many bright spots of our arts-laden community.
Dennis Kostecki
Mammoth Lakes
