Mail letters to Letters, Santa Fe Reporter, PO Box 2306, Santa Fe NM 87504, deliver them to 132 E. Marcy St., fax them to 988-5348, e-mail them to editor@sfreporter.com, or use our online form.
PEACEFUL PLIGHT
It's easy to say "pesky little rodents" and dismiss peaceful, intelligent, creatures like Santa Fe's prairie dogs [
Cover story, April 23: "Dog Gone"
]. They have been trapped by development, and have now (through no natural choice of their own) become "urban wildlife" for which we humans have some responsibility.
Thanks to the reporter who wrote this story for telling the story of their plight.
ANN PUSTEJOVSKY
SANTA FE
UM, HELLO
Gov. Bill Richardson wants a new job in Obama's cabinet [
SFR Talk, April 23: "Political Postmortem"
]?…News flash, McCain will be president 2009.
DEBBIE FULTON
SANTA FE
TAX THANKS
I want to be sure to publicly THANK everyone involved with the Tax Help project at Santa Fe Community College [
Winners & Losers, April 9: "Working-class taxpayers"
]. I found that the free and invaluable service was offered to all with virtually no hassles.
The ease and friendliness that was evident even at the April 15 deadline hours was a testament to the commitment by all staff and volunteers. As a recent transplant to Santa Fe, I'm continually amazed at the many services that are offered to so many here-and ALL with a smile and NO traffic!
VICKI SCHNEIDER
SANTA FE
ARTISTS IN DANGER
Here's hot issue for Zane Fischer and everyone who supports creative freedom and income for the producing artist. There is a bill in Congress called The Orphans bill that would require artists to register each image with the government to have copyright protection. This is unnecessary due to a bill in the 1970s which protected all artists and their ownership of their work.
What is really going on here is that Big Government needs revenue for its military projects (not to mention the derivatives losses, which will dwarf the losses of the Depression) and wants to raise revenues by charging us to register all our creative work.
It doesn't take a brain surgeon to see that art used in ads, postcards and Web sites, as well as published images in the Santa Fe Reporter, become public property without the formal registration of the art. Corporations will be able to issue print editions without artists, using work they appropriated from the Web or wherever. Santa Fe will have financial disaster, as an art-producing city, because if artists don't register, they have no income residuals or ownership.
If we don't mobilize immediately to prevent this action in Congress, we have only ourselves to blame.
H MARGRET
SANTA FE
IN MEMORY
Lobsang was one of my first Tibetan friends. He was always the most polite and most scholarly of them all. He accomplished a world of good in his educating and translating. Many of his books were introduced with a short preface by His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. Lobsang's scholarly efforts were formidable, and he often declined contact with the world and its repetitive news, good or bad, when he was in retreat.
He was the best translator between Tibetan and English in the world, and his scholar words included a life of Milarepa and many others.
Of course, this is a devastating and terrible tragedy for his widow, Gisela, and for his children. However, knowing Lobsang, he would not want any of us to be disconsolate; life is fleeting; death comes unpredictably, and that is much the nature at the heart of his faith in Buddhism.
I hope the Tibetan Association of Santa Fe will rise to the occasion and have a memorial service and many more marches around the Plaza as the Olympics draw near, in honor of this great, great man, Lobsang Lhalungpa, who so tremendously enriched the lives of so many that he touched with his infinite calm, reasoning and brilliant insights.
We will all miss him terribly.
STEPHEN FOX
SANTA FE
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