Once again I lead with stories of Starvation in Gaza. An adult can live 50 to 60 days without food. The Israelis’ have allowed very little food into Gaza and people are dying of starvation. Hundreds of Palestinian people have been shot while trying to get food from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. An agency set up by us. They have been forcing people to these sites and shooting at them. We are complicit.

The President Donald Trump administration has jailed people for speaking out against the killing in Gaza. They have chosen vulnerable people, foreign students and journalists to punish but it won’t stop there.

Trump is building concentration camps to hold undocumented people who have been here for years. Do you think those camps will stay empty once all those people are deported? Do you think the companies will just give up their lucrative business of detaining people?

ICE has been going to people’s immigration hearings and people who have followed all the rules are being rounded up and taken to concentration camps. They have picked up U.S. citizens and held them without due process. In our constitution every person, meaning every human no matter what their status is entitled to a hearing in court. Either everyone is protected or no one is protected.

Instead of investing in new technology, healthcare or housing we are building prisons. This is not a good choice.

Never mind the fact that 40% of all farm workers are undocumented, and 30% of all construction workers are undocumented. Who will do those jobs? They are the lowest paid dirtiest jobs.

The Republicans seem to think there are people covered by Medicaid who could work. They don’t seem to realize that most people on Medicaid are working but their employer does not have insurance for them. We are in fact subsidizing the low wages of major companies with SNAP and Medicaid.

We could raise the minimum wage. That would help with the problem of hunger. We are going to see hunger and poverty on a scale not seen since the great depression of the 1930s. Businesses can’t make plans because Trump is causing the stock market to swing wildly with the tariffs he puts on and takes off at a whim. Factories are idle because he has disrupted the supply chains. Crops go unpicked because of lack of labor.

We are on an airplane that is being steered by a 79-year-old man who does not understand that tariffs are paid by US consumers, or that newcomers bring the country strength.

He is building a master database to keep track of everyone in the country. Databases that have always been isolated from each other, like Social Security and Medicare are being linked up. DOGE did very little looking for waste, fraud and abuse but mostly they stole a lot of our data and they have plans to use it. We should all be concerned about that.

Among all the things to be concerned about. Our democratic system is under attack. There are fierce redistricting battles going on. The Republicans know that they are not popular so they are trying to choose their voters.

Voter suppression is much more widespread and has terrible consequences. 100,000 black voters were taken off the Florida voter rolls in the presidential election of 2000. We looked at hanging chads and hand recounts but if those 100,000 votes had been counted he would have won and in fact did win the popular vote.

It’s worth considering where we would be if Al Gore had become our president instead of George W. Bush. We would be leading the world in green technology and manufacturing. We would not have invaded Iraq. We would be investing in trains and people.

It’s too late to stop the Global Warming that is happening. When air is warmer it holds more water. It dries out more ground and then dumps it all at once. The flash floods are going to get a lot worse and a lot more frequent. People in places like Forestville need to harden their infrastructure to protect against floods. Global Warming is more expensive than solar energy.

Human beings are causing the sixth great extinction event in earth’s history.

The newspaper could write a story every day of a different Scientist describing the death of the whole studied population. The paper doesn’t because it doesn’t pay. Instead they give us a whole section on sports.

Bread and circuses and they are about to take away the bread unless we take our democracy back.

The circus costs money too. Buffalo has an affordable housing problem. Private industry is not going to build affordable housing. It doesn’t pay. Rent in Buffalo is $2,000 a month. Buffalo also needs to work on its streets and plow the sidewalks.

The stadium is costing taxpayers $850,000,000. Maybe not everything should be privately owned. Maybe the Bills should be owned by the people of Buffalo instead of Terry Pegula. The people of Buffalo would never say “Give me a new stadium with more expensive seats or I am taking my team away.”

Marie Tomlinson is a Fredonia resident.