That office is there for us - the public - when we need information, or when we have complaints about city government. In the past 15-16 years, I have used the OIC many times.
That office's employees always made sure if they couldn't address my concern or request immediately, they would follow up by phone or letter or, in some instances, had the appropriate city agency contact me directly.
Without a well-staffed OIC, the public will end up going around in circles and being referred from one city agency to the next, getting nowhere.
Most of us are too damn busy to call around to various departments to get the action required. Neither can we wait weeks or months for services or information because of staffing cuts.
Art Frank
Makaha
Ignoring this concern and producing the lame excuse that the surveyed sample wasn't "big enough" further encourages ice use. If immediate action is not taken against these individuals, Hawaii will soon be looking ahead to a bleak and broken future.
Continued ignorance will result in an increased number of high school and college drop-outs, wasted minds, and additional eruptions of violence throughout the islands. The statistics have spoken; the time to act is now.
Evie Joy Kanno
Mililani High, Grade 11
Six to eight children are confirmed as victims of abuse and neglect everyday. Far worse, Hawaii is one of only three states across the nation that cut funding for the prevention and treatment of child abuse and neglect in 1995 despite an increase in the number and severity of cases reported.
A home-visitation program called Healthy Start that helps parents and keeps child abuse from occurring began here in Hawaii. It is so successful that states all across the country are copying it to reduce their incidence of child abuse. The state of Hawaii cut funding to Healthy Start.
Drug use treatment and prevention programs are also losing funding, although 80 percent of the cases of child abuse also involve substance abuse.
Treatment and prevention of child abuse are not things we can afford to do away with or only partially fund as our state is currently doing. Sure it costs money; most necessary things do.
Charles G. Braden Jr.
Executive Director, Hawaii Chapter
National Committee for
Prevention of Child Abuse
Objectivity is their claim, but the claim is false. From the start they come to their work with the bias that only anthropology, literary criticism and reason are legitimate tools for identifying the real Jesus.
The Jesus they have manufactured looks suspiciously like themselves. He is seen as a liberationist and feminist who rejected the social institutions and traditions of his day.
Conservative Lutherans (and many other conservative Christians) do not lack for scholarship. This is not a matter of good scholarship against bad.
We find that the most reasonable explanation for the four gospels presenting Jesus as they do is because that is precisely who he is.
PASTOR DON BARON
Good Shepherd Lutheran Church