Each month, The Pilot reprints the letters judged to be the best from the previous month.

Average Citizens Have Been Ignored

FROM AUG. 15: I am a citizen of this once great nation, and I am in fear of what this country and planet will look like for my 4-year-old son. I don’t think that anyone on Capitol Hill understands the average citizen.

I understand that big corporations and banks are what helped the politicians fund their campaigns to their offices, but it is the average blue collar citizen who keeps America going. We have been ignored and are on our way to extinction.

The banks that our hard-earned tax dollars bailed out will soon be in the same position they were in before the government gave them all the money. Mr. President, the government could have paid off every American mortgage in existence, and the banks would have received the money anyway. The citizens would have had extra income to spend on the economy, and we would have created more jobs.

I had to sell my home, and now, at age 47 and a single father, I am living in an apartment. American citizens just want to go to their jobs, work their shifts and then go home to family. As the government continues to send millions of dollars to Pakistan and Mexico, we here at home can’t pay our power bill, buy our children school clothes or sometimes even food.

I am deeply ashamed of our government and what it has done to our people. You ran your whole campaign on change. All the people see is change for the worse.

When I was a child, I was proud to stand in my classroom, put my hand on my chest and pledge to God and country. Now my pride is filled with debts of despair and sadness. May God have mercy on us all because our elected officials have none.

William Calloway

Aberdeen

Ten Uses for an Empty Steakhouse

FROM AUG. 18: If David Letterman perchance had read the online edition of The Pilot in the past few months, it might have been reflected in one of his top 10 lists.

I surmise his newest list could be: 10 ways to use a brand-new, million-dollar steakhouse, completed September 2009, but still yet to open:

1. Open a food court.
2. Lease it to a cooking school for $15,000 per month.
3. Open a local office of BP public relations.
4. Hold Gov. Bev Perdue/ highway patrol weekly morality instruction classes.
5. Make it a local chapter of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).
6. Have weekly Sarah Palin/tea party square dance competitions.
7. Create the first Harris Blake/China museum using Obama stimulus funds.
8. Install an inside shuffleboard court and skating rink for senior citizens.
9. Have the federal government, by eminent domain, use it as a U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services center.
10. Move the national office of the International Society of Arboriculture to this venue.

At its open house celebration, a roundtable discussion might be: “Why cut down old growth trees to build restaurants that never open?”

Mark Barber

Pinebluff