Correspondence

My aunt’s upstairs neighbor is a radical, stoner, hippie rabbi. Thirty years ago, the mayor of Marfa rescued a skullcap that belonged to this rabbi’s friend. As the story goes, this rabbi’s friend finished studying the Torah with his spiritual master in Israel. When he left the holy land, his guru gave him a skullcap. A skullcap, for those who don’t know, is the signature circular hat that religious Jewish people wear. To receive one from your spiritual master is a significant gift.

When he returned to the United States, he was traveling across the country by train. As the train approached Marfa, he was standing in between cars. While standing between the cars, his skullcap flew off his head and landed somewhere in the desert. This caused him incredible distress, as he thought he lost the skullcap forever. He wrote a letter to the mayor of Marfa explaining his situation. When the mayor received the letter, he sent a search and rescue party to look for it.

Lo and behold, they found it! The mayor of Marfa rescued the skullcap and returned it to this guy by mail, thirty years ago.

To all my friends in Marfa, Happy Jewish New Year.

Yano Rivera

Berkeley, California

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All the polls for a long time now have shown that an overwhelming majority of Americans, 70 percent, wanted the United States out of Iraq and want the U.S. out of Afghanistan now, not later.

Under President Obama’s foreign policy leadership, America has ended the war in Iraq, killed Osama Bin Laden, and decimated Al Qaeda.

And yet the Romney/Ryan ticket continues to criticize the President’s foreign policy record, while possessing zero foreign policy experience themselves, and continues to bluster as if they would have no compunction against getting us involved militarily in even more unseemly places such as Iran or Syria.

The problem is that a substantial number of those 70 percent ignore the dangerous republican tendency of involving us in remote foreign wars and vote republican anyway.  The question that remains is why?  Is there any other single issue (social, economic, health) more important to individuals than protecting the lives, health, and well being of our Service Men and Women by refusing to allow this country to continually become entangled in horrific and deadly wars thousands of miles from our shores?

Regardless of your personal feelings on social, economic, or health issues, I beseech you to put them aside and vote for the party that has demonstrated most clearly it’s commitment to the judicious use and protection of our Armed Forces.

Lee Scarborough

Fort Davis

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“In every way, what has been happening is a reflection of the Obama administration’s unwillingness to engage in serious U.S. policy throughout the region,” said Danielle Pletka of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “We have no coherent policy in the Middle East.”

May I suggest a coherent policy for U.S. in the Middle East: we should get completely out of the entire area and let them have at it.

Ken Whitley

Marfa