The AARP Driver Safety Program in Maine thanks Bill Nemitz for asking “When must elderly drivers give up the keys?” His treatment of the issue was personal and timely. Maine’s population is getting older and at a pace faster than the national average. Thus Maine’s driving population is quickly aging.

The vast majority of drivers age 62 and older are perfectly capable of getting there from here safely. However, most of us have also heard or seen warning signs of unsafe driving, like going too slow or unpredictable stopping in traffic. What should we do before a real tragedy happens? Enroll in an AARP driver safety class.

Additional Photos

High-speed conditions on Interstate 95 can magnify deficiencies in an older driver's hearing and vision that are caused by aging. Staff file photo

AARP developed the class in 1979 and has been improving it ever since. In 2010, trained volunteers taught 65 classes and educated 881 participants in Maine. Designed for those age 55 and older, each participant learns how vision, hearing and reaction time are affected by aging. They are instructed in strategies such as the three-second rule and scanning, which can compensate for the aging process.

Each class explores the right-of-way and being alert at intersections. These are the two primary causes of crashes involving older drivers. Surveys tell us that each course participant will change at least one driving habit as a result of attending the four-hour class.

To find a class near you, log on to www.aarp.org/drive or call AARP Maine at (866) 554-5380. Besides becoming a safer driver, each participant gets an auto insurance discount by Maine law.

Tom Harvey

Maine AARP driver safety coordinator

Hartford

Tea party’s grass roots nurtured by ‘super rich’

The tea party is portrayed as a spontaneous, grass-roots, people-power movement. While I personally find few tea party issues I agree with, their energy, commitment and honesty are really impressive.

But does being spontaneous, local and powerful benefit us average folks?

According to the Guardian Weekly, the Koch brothers, owners of a family corporation worth $35 billion, recently held their annual meeting of 200 extremely conservative “super rich” at a California resort. Their primary agenda is to continue to use their impressive wealth to fund the tea party, the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute to work on the following: climate-change denial, anti-government efforts, and getting rid of our new health care law.

Jo Ann Myers

Waldoboro

Let Maine people decide value of health care plan

This is a response to the Feb. 6 article titled “Health or Wealth.” After reading it, I came up with just one word: hypocrisy.

In the beginning of the article, the authors dismissed the so-called “market” solutions that have been adopted in the past 30 years. The only solutions that I can think of were all government-created solutions, not market solutions.

The authors seem to think Medicare, Medicaid, HMOs, PPOs, Dirigo and lobbying by insurance companies to get these programs adopted are creations of the market. It is these programs, and many others, that are driving health care costs and the difficulties for some of the populace to pay for them.

But their solution, which they call Maine AllCare, adopts truly free-market principles, such as letting the consumer and provider decide on what care is to be provided, and letting hospitals be free to offer other services determined on need. What utter hypocrisy on their part.

In closing, I challenge the people who want to offer this program to do so as soon as possible. If what they are offering is as good as they claim, people will be lining up for these services. However, if these people are going to get the government to either mandate or force this program on the people of Maine, then they are no different than those insurance companies they criticize.

Take this program to the people, not to the politicos and bureaucrats in Augusta.

Jean Carbonneau

Portland

Time for Maine Democrats to get right with the Lord

I see that Steve Myers has come forth with another controversial cartoon, this time depicting what the atmosphere was like when a man of faith prayed before the opening of the Maine House of Representatives. In it, a big floppy-eared elephant, obviously a Republican, says “Forgive us, Lord, for having elected Godless Democrats.”

In the front row are two elephant-eared legislators who say “Amen,” and two pointy-eared donkeys, one of whom exclaims “What the?” with righteous anger contorting his equine face. Then the proverbial little mouse asks “Are we on a crusade?”

Some will say they don’t know, or care, while others might say they have no way of knowing. But not the donkey. Obviously, he sincerely feels that the word “Godless” doesn’t apply to him.

Hmmm … let’s see now, it’s written in God’s word “Thou shalt not kill,” and “Thou shalt not shed innocent blood.” Yet the majority of Democrats have thumbed their noses at God’s proclamation by seeing to it that 4,000 innocents die every day of the year.

How about pornography, which creates adultery, millions of divorces, uncountable rapes and murders, to say nothing of the subsequent breakup of what successful governments consist of — the family? Yet the Democratic majority votes for it, many laughing all the way to church.

God also decreed, “Man shall not lay with a man as with a woman. It is an abomination.” Here we see yet another of God’s commandments being proudly rebelled against. Meanwhile they shake their fists at God’s words, saying it’s “bigoted hate speech.”

Here we see the Democratic plank mirroring all of the above. In view of this, you’d think the donkeys would pause long enough to ask God, “How goes it with my soul?”

Philip E. Kennard

Windham

‘Working class’ doesn’t have to mean uneducated

After reading Mark Ferguson’s letter in the Sunday Telegram, explaining why “working guys in Maine are fed up” with your liberal reporting and won’t buy your paper, I couldn’t help but wonder what major newspaper he does buy and read? I hope he isn’t choosing to be uninformed simply because he doesn’t agree with some of your editorials.

Also, though I entirely agree with Ferguson that “working people are the backbone of this nation,” I disagree with him on two points about working people: one, his notion that they uniformly agree with his conservative views (they simply do not), or his more deeply disturbing suggestion that being well-educated implicitly means being out of touch with working-class America.

My father was a truck driver who never finished high school, but he was intelligent enough to know that he should seek information on issues that influenced his life, and that much of that information would come from educated people.

My father respected an educated opinion. He wasn’t ashamed not to have a “fancy degree” (as Ferguson called it), but he certainly wasn’t proud to be uneducated. He urged me to go to college; he didn’t put it down as something that would distance me from my working-class background.

It seemed in Ferguson’s letter that he was somehow suggesting our governor can most effectively keep his finger on the pulse of the working class by being uneducated. If so, that’s a very strange notion to my mind.

Dana Sawyer

Portland

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