Destructive personalities
To the editor,
I live at the corner of First Avenue and Seventh Street in Columbia Falls. Every year my family and I go out of our way to decorate our house and lawn in the spirit of Christmas. Over the past few years, there has been a shadow cast over our lighting display, and that shadow is vandalism.
Most of the time the vandalism has not been anything too serious -a few rocks thrown or a small ornament stolen and later returned by pranksters-but this year many of my inflatable decorations were seriously damaged by blow darts.
These darts have a metal shaft about four or five inches long and are capped with a plastic end. They are shot by individuals with little to no appreciation for private property or the expense that people go through in order to create an enjoyable holiday scene.
If it were just a harmless prank, which had a humorous outcome or didn't cause damage, I would have no reason to complain, but it is people such as this that are also going around shooting the squirrels, cats and dogs in our neighborhood.
These are people like the teens I caught this summer throwing rocks and injuring a neighborhood cat. It is a pointless and harmful act from which the only pleasure that can be drawn is that of a sadist or coward too afraid to stand up to a real challenge, so he/she picks on the defenseless.
I am sure that the individuals who do this are not representative of the teen community in our town, but are a handful of malcontents that were never taught to be respectful of others and were not raised with discipline and self-control.
Parents of such individuals need to think twice about the way they raised their children before they allow them to own items that could be potentially harmful.
Jack Carabin
Columbia Falls
The Soros connection
To the editor,
After watching The Fire Next Time, a documentary by Patrice O'Neill and her movie company, The Working Group, I got the feeling I was watching a Michael Moore remake of the great American Western, the good guys versus the bad guys.
The scene is our Flathead Valley, and by using carefully edited interviews, O'Neill casts the "good guys" as the environmentalists and the "bad guys" as the multiple use advocates. By placing both sides in extreme camps and not addressing any middle-ground viewpoints, it is not hard to realize that O'Neill's documentary never had the intent to inform but rather to inflame opinion on both sides of the environmental issues at hand.
That being said, the real plot of O'Neill's documentary seems to come at the end of the film with the credits showing its financial sponsors, the most notable being the Sundance Documentary Fund. Formerly known as the Soros Documentary Fund, George Soros changed his fund's name to Sundance in 2001.
Getting back to O'Neill's documentary, not only did the Sundance (Soros) Documentary Fund provide financial backing for her film, they are co-founders of her production company, The Working Group. If the name Sundance sounds familiar, actor Robert Redford announced his Sundance (Soros) International Documentary Fund in January 2002, backed by a $4.6 million contribution from George Soros.
Maybe our Flathead Valley residents can help Patrice, George and Robert put out The Fire Next Time, or better yet, just keep it from starting, especially since we now know who's holding the matches.
Jon Cole
Polebridge