When students are unsafe, mental health suffers

Our country is dealing with an epidemic of teen/child fragility. One cause is social media, the other is mass shootings. Schoolyards used to be safe spaces for kids to play in before or after school. Now they all have security fences, cameras, security guards, lock-down drills and fob IDs to enter the buildings. Or, as one teen put it to me: “The badges are so they can identify you after you are shot.”

Sadly, the news trickles down on the playground. As a mental health clinician, I’ve had to talk to children as young as first and second grade about their fears of a shooter coming to their school or what to do if you are locked out of the classroom or if your teacher is shot. No parent I know of wants this to be a reality for their children. Here in Denver, as reported by The Denver Post, 1 in 10 of our high school students reported not going to school because they felt unsafe. Perhaps taking a public health issue approach can solve the problem of mass shootings that politicians have not been able to solve.

Craig A. Knippenberg, Denver

U.S. is headed to financial disaster. Does anyone care?

I recently read and confirmed our federal government is borrowing $1 trillion every 100 days. This amounts to about $3.6 trillion per year. When you divide the $1 trillion amount by 100 you get a daily total of $10 billion borrowed per day. These are truly staggering figures and the glaring lack of attention to them are indicative of a national government in total denial of the irresponsible path it has chosen.

Tax-paying citizens and the businesses they work for would not, and could not manage their personal and business finances in this manner without placing their financial solvency at risk. Why our federal government seems to think the priority of sound financial management does not apply to them is magical thinking seeking to ignore and escape the boundaries of fiscal reality.

Per a study by an Ivy League business school, current fiscal policy is unsustainable. The U.S. only has about 20 years to implement serious corrective action without which no amount of future tax increases or spending cuts will be able to avoid default.

This would be a future likely to include rampant inflation, serious disruption of our economy, a significant reduction in the capabilities of the U.S. government and adverse impacts on individual prosperity, savings and investment. Does our government have the will to address this problem seriously? Sadly, it seems unlikely. However, I think it would be worthwhile if we all contacted our Congressional representatives and senators and asked them to make this a priority issue.

Robert Heath, Lakewood

Voters’ powers taken by monied interests

Data from a Princeton study collected over 20 years has found that in spite of all of the public polling, all of the windbaggery on TV and in newspaper opinion editorials, and all of the virtue signaling done by our elected politicians — the opinions of average citizens have next to zero impact on laws.

Laws are nonetheless made, so what does have an impact? Money, of course! This seems like the world’s least surprising finding, but why is this acceptable to us, and why doesn’t the media do more to try to highlight who actually holds all of the power? The people with the most money more often than not win the elections. And those who receive the most money more often than not acquire it from rich benefactors. These rich contributors, business interests, and lobbying groups do not contribute from the goodness of their hearts; they have agendas.

So as we come off of one primary election where the media gaslights us into believing that “centrists and moderates” won out, it’s worth keeping in mind, that a lot of these people won because they received money from rich and powerful special interests and lobbyists. The winners of these races are not moderates, they are corporate extremists hell-bent on making sure that we will forever be at war, that your children never receive health care, and that you will never have an affordable place to live.

As we come to the general election remember: They don’t care what you think.

David Gonzalez, Denver

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Originally Published: July 9, 2024 at 1:32 p.m.