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Readers write: Overcoming fear, keeping treasures, county fair values

Letters to the editor for the Sept. 18, 2017 weekly magazine.

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US Forest Service
A timber rattlesnake, captured in a tube, will be fitted with a transmitter in order to discover and protect new dens.
  • By Gwendolyn Whitmore Monitor reader
  • Leonora Tobin Monitor reader
  • Forrest Walpole Monitor reader

Overcoming fear

Regarding the Sept. 11 Science & Nature article “Learning to live with rattlesnakes”: I have three snakes (not rattlesnakes) in my two gardens, in the front and the back of my yard. 

I have been working all summer (and the past two summers) to overcome a long-standing fear of them. This article helps me immensely. Thank you.

Gwendolyn Whitmore

Tigard, Ore.

Keeping treasures

Regarding the July 25 Monitor Daily article “A handing down of cherished ‘stuff’? Receiving generation says ‘no.’ ”: I still love and use all my treasures collected over 78 years. They remind me of my travels and living abroad. 

The names of my children are posted on the back of the furniture I had made in Italy and Taiwan. They all want those memories to last and the good times remembered. 

They want my china, crystal, and silver from Greece, Spain, and Ireland as well as my bronze chargers from Thailand. I also have eight grandchildren and they have requested items that have a connection to the travel we did together.

I am so happy they will enjoy them in years to come.

Leonora Tobin

Madison, Conn.

County fair values

Thank you for the marvelous report “At a Colorado county fair, an exhibition of values” on the Moffat County Fair in the Aug. 24 Monitor Daily. It is reassuring to know that there are places where children are still taught responsibility, family values, and a love of the flag. It is obvious that the fair experience also builds community.

It is to your credit that you devoted space to this story.

Forrest Walpole

Highlands Ranch, Colo.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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