Speak Out

While attending a ballgame recently, I witnessed the frustration of many as the National Anthem was played twice within minutes. The anthem was played at the beginning of a game, and a few minutes later another team took the field nearby and they played the National Anthem again.

The person in charge showed her lack of knowledge regarding the National Anthem when she was questioned about the back-to-back renditions.

Small children were asking what that was all about. How do we teach our children to stop what they are doing when the National Anthem is playing as batters run the bases? If a tournament is being played, either stop all the games, make an announcement or play the National Anthem at the beginning of the tournament.

Can you imagine stopping the race at Talladega Superspeedway after each caution? What I witnessed today was just as ridiculous.

Ken Rollins
Oxford

Renewable energy

Record heat, record drought, record floods — you don't have to be a polar bear to sense that something's not right with our weather. More and more, I'm talking to people who have decided to do something about it. There's not one sole cause of the problem and there won't be just one solution.

I was encouraged to hear the American West described as "the Saudi Arabia of wind power." And I'm proud that Alabama's scientists are among the leaders in developing ethanol, not from corn, but from switchgrass.

Right now, we can buy electricity from Alabama Power Co. that is produced from clean-burning switchgrass instead of coal. My household isn't ready to switch over completely, but what about going to 10 percent renewable energy? The switchgrass power costs about $2.25 extra per 50 kilowatt-hour block purchased because it's new technology. Here's the challenge: can my household conserve enough energy so that our bill stays the same? So far, it's working.

America has the best engineers and innovators in the world. If we can send a man to the moon, certainly we can become better stewards of our own planet.

Susan Di Biase
Jacksonville

Biblical contradictions

Re "Context inaccurate" (Speak Out, June 2):

Letter writer Joel Hendon practices Humpty Dumpty exegesis. It was Humpty Dumpty who coined the solipsistic syllogism, "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less."

Hendon attempts to "refute" my letter's clear examples of the Bible taking itself out of context by claiming that they were merely "poetic types." Any passage in any document can be twisted into anything you want it to say if it all may merely be a "poetic type."

This explains why Christians themselves cannot agree on what the Bible means, splitting into thousands of denominations, each professing that God revealed the meaning of the Bible to them more accurately than to every other denomination.

It didn't work for Humpty Dumpty, and it won't work for us.

Robert Collins
Birmingham