World Chimpanzee Day

Editor:

World Chimpanzee Day is (was) July 14, and future generations will look back in denunciation at how we’ve allowed our closest non-human kin to be torn from their mothers, thrown into cages, experimented on, infected with diseases, locked in roadside zoos, and forced to perform.

Dr. Jane Goodall and other scientists have irrefutably documented that chimpanzees live in rich, complex, and often difficult societies that closely parallel our own. We know that chimpanzees love, grieve, work, and play. They are highly intelligent, protect their families, come to the aid of friends, understand the concept of “fairness” and use tools.

The Captive Primate Safety Act would ban the private ownership, private breeding, and private commercial trade of monkeys and great apes.

If you feel that these keenly intelligent and social beings should not be denied everything that gives their lives meaning, please contact your federal legislators and urge them to cosponsor the bipartisan Captive Primate Safety Act. The cycle of suffering must end.

Yours truly,

Jennifer O’Connor

Senior Writer, PETA Foundation

Norfolk, VA

Gaza’s destruction cannot be justified as self-defense

Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania recently stated that he would leave the Democratic Party if it became anti-Israel and did not support Israel’s right to defend itself.

But destroying the means of sustaining human life in Gaza is not self-defense. This includes Israel’s devastation of Gaza’s fields, orchards, greenhouses, water infrastructure and homes.

After the ceasefire began, Israel destroyed an additional 1,500 buildings in Gaza. Multiple United Nations agencies and humanitarian groups also report that Israel has blocked or severely restricted shelter supplies, including tarps, timber, plywood, and sandbags from entering the Gaza Strip. Families are forced to live in permanent tent cities, with their makeshift homes infested with rats and parasites.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said, “We are disassembling Gaza, and leaving it as piles of rubble…And the world isn’t stopping us.”

Being pro-Israel should not mean downplaying or denying the atrocities Israel has committed.

Terry Hansen

Grafton, Wisconsin

We still have a choice

Editor:

Anyone here who has watched a snowball come down a long hill knows how this works. At the top it’s small — you can steer it or stop it with one hand. By the bottom, all you can do is get out of the way. Bankers call it compounding. Around here we just call it a snowball, and right now our governments are pushing two of them down the same hill at once.

The first is debt. When we borrow to pay for tax cuts, that debt grows with interest, year after year, whether we watch it or not. What looks manageable today is heavier every winter it rolls.

The second grows more quietly. When we cut what we invest in children — early education, health, the basics that help a kid start even — we don’t save that money. We postpone the bill, and it comes back larger. A child who falls behind early tends to fall further behind each year, and problems we could have met cheaply become expensive ones later.

You don’t have to look far to see it. There are children right here in the Copper Country who don’t have enough to eat on the weekend. Something in our area, run by volunteers, exists just to send food home with them. It is hard to learn much on an empty stomach, and feeding a child on a Saturday is about as far up the hill as steering ever gets — small, cheap, and it changes everything that comes after.

We too often treat that as charity. It isn’t. Spending on children is an investment — and an investment in the future, because these are the people who will run this place after us. Economists have shown for decades that good early-childhood programs pay us back many times over. Set against borrowing at interest to cut taxes, investing in kids is simply the better deal.

Here is what matters most. Today, both snowballs are still near the top of the hill — big enough to worry about, small enough to steer. Five or ten years from now, those choices may be gone. A crisis makes the decisions for you, and it never makes the kind ones.

So let me say it plainly, on the record, in July of 2026: we can see this coming, and we can still act. We knew. We had time. We had a choice.

Let’s steer.

Brendhan Givens

Houghton