January 28, 1996
People on the lower end of the government chain will continue to be forced to face pay-less paydays while the administrative and legislative departments continue to posture during an election year.
Start a grass-roots action by circulating a petition to have a new law placed on the ballot for the coming election. This law would provide that all Congress members and their staffs would work without pay and would not be reimbursed at a later date if there was a partial government shutdown. This would also hold true for all members of the administrative branch.
onald S. Allen
Pasadena
When fanaticism takes over
The way to solve a budget problem is to create a crisis in the budget. Pay federal workers for not working and don't pay other workers for working, as well as halting services to taxpayers. What a concept!
Is this the kind of Congress we get when we place freshman legislators on important budget committees? It seems that enthusiasm and idealistic fanaticism has gotten ahead of mature judgment.
In my opinion, the current behavior of the majority party in Congress offers the best evidence that a revolution (devolution) is at hand. The public needs to decide if this is what they had in mind when the voted in '94 or would they rather stage their own coup at the ballot box in '96 with a third party.
Patricia M. Ranney
Millersville
A needle in a haystack? Try phone in snowbank
Crazy things happen along with everything else when 22 inches of snow followed by several more fall during one week.
My strange event happened at my home. I had struggled around to the back of the house to try to dig out the screen door to the porch, and to reduce the drifts on the porch itself. I took a telephone along since I didn't know how long I would be out. After getting the door freed up wide enough to squeeze through, soon gave up on digging out the porch since there wasn't any place to put the snow.
Arriving back at the front, the bent-down branches of the kriptomaria tree needed "desnowing," and following that, I put a trash bag over the boxwood, a 2-foot-in-diameter shrub near the front door, since 6 more inches of white were forecast (correctly, it turned out).
As I started into the house, I noted to my horror the telephone was missing out of my pocket and visualized the numerous drifts had negotiated, not to mention the regular depths.
My husband was soon due back from the grocery store and the thought of telling him I had lost the phone was unpleasant. I got down and pawed through a wide area and found nothing -- and suddenly had a bright idea.
I went in and called a housebound friend in Baltimore and asked him to ring my number, and hang up and call again when a message came on.
Returning to the snowy scene, I wandered around and listened -- and sure enough, eventually a lovely ringing sound was faintly heard beneath the depths.
I kept following it back near the house, where it seemed to be in the area of the boxwood. Upon removing the trash bag, I reached down and to my delight felt the now cold and ringing object nestled in the thick greenery of the shrub.
I turned it on and happily told my friend that the little scheme had worked -- just as my husband turned into the drive.
His only question was why I was standing knee deep in snow talking on the phone, not realizing how happy I was to be doing just that.
V. L. Bennett
Pasadena
