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To the Editor:
I congratulate you on your continued Civic involvement in town [city] affaire. Your continued efforts to make Franklinites aware of their civic responsibilities like voting fill a critically important need. I also took notice of the list you published of visits of the police and fire departments to the hotel where our South and Central American guests are staying. I found that: considering the language problem that some of our guests may have, the nature of the hotel business, and the strangeness of both the culture and the country experienced by our guests, the phone calls did not seem to be all that numerous. It would be interesting to know who [not specifically by name], but rather by context in the general population was making them. How many were from the hotel, and how many were from neighbors?
I do not recall a record of hotel calls to our public services being published before in local publications, but then I may have just missed them. I am just curious that’s all. When considering where our guests have come from, it must be nice to be somewhere where people are not shooting at you as a weekly or even daily event, but at the same time, it must be scary for these people being in an alien culture where they may feel the frustration of not being able to speak our language, Standard American English, but then all of our ancestors were immigrants to America the Anglo-Colonies, and United States at one time. My people were traveling all over Northern and North Central Europe between 850 C.E. and 1841, arriving in America, in shifts, between Viking times and 1841. We got around alright!
If you stop to think of it, it is a miracle that any of us are here in Good Old Franklin at all. And thinking about the horrible new war in the Mid-East, I feel very sorry for those poor Bastards who have been cooped up in the Gaza Strip for decades under the dictatorship of several successive thugs, most recently Hamas, whose creepy terrorists hide out among them, and then these poor people are hemmed in by Israel to the North and East, and hemmed in by Egypt to the South and Southwest and Southeast, and by the Devil and the deep blue sea to their West! Their population is frequently very well educated to a large degree, God only knows how. A large percentage of the Gaza population tends to speak several languages including English with a great degree of fluency. And the efforts to exterminate Israel cannot ever be countenanced. The poor Israelis, who have made The Art of Survival truly a fine art indeed, have no need to be promiscuously slaughtered raped, beheaded, and otherwise molested in their own nation.
I hope that your offering of the police and fire reports does not stir-up any discontent among our general population that might not understand you were merely satisfying general public curiosity, as indeed a public service, in regards to our use of our public safety resources. Altogether a difficult situation of housing a group of most unfortunate people has been well handled by the Town Administrator and the Relevantly Involved Departments of Franklin our Town Government. Once again we must say that they have done a difficult job well.
Yours truly,
James C. Johnston Jr.
[Editor's Note: We appreciate all of Jim's comments and observations and definitely don't mean to stir up a negative response. We do think the public deserves to know more than they are usually told. The state, in particular, has been opaque, leaving it up to local authorities to solve many difficult challenge.]
