Letters to the Editor: Feb. 8, 2024

Former Camas student urges voters to approve CSD replacement levies

As a former K-12 Camas student (Camas High School class of 2014), my classmates and I benefited immensely from both classroom and extracurricular programs funded by Camas school levies — sports, music, theater and robotics were just a few of the levy-funded programs that cultivated a life-influencing opportunity after my high school graduation. Looking back, I see why this educational experience is the reason so many families chose to make Camas their home.

My participation and development as a Camas football and baseball player, with levy-funded coaches, trainers and facilities, instilled a love and purpose in something that has catapulted me thus far in life.

Incredibly, it has taken me to other parts of our globe, where I have been able to share my experience, continue my learning opportunity, teach, give back and, hopefully, bring back this passion to my Camas community. It is with such pride that I boast — in all the places I have lived and to all the people I have met and friends I have made — about the town in which I was raised and of all that was made possible to me by an amazing Camas community and its extraordinary educational programs.

I am only one example in a very large pool of Camas graduates who share this pride and thankfulness. There are many more to come from your continued support and renewal of these important levies. I hope for and look forward to hearing about future life-influencing opportunities from every student who gets so lucky to grow up in Camas schools.

Please join me in voting Yes for Camas Schools

Reilly Hennessey,

Camas

Let’s resolve to do better this election year

It’s an election year. Four years ago was an election year — a year that came to be known, in our house, as “The Year that Shall Not Be Named.”

Rather than repeating the ugliness of that year, might we resolve, at this year’s beginning, to do better?

Soon will begin all the justifications we make for our electoral means in the name of our electoral ends. Before that happens, let’s acknowledge that ends can never justify means which violate other ends of greater value.

In other words, despite the “who” we so desperately wish to see elected, we may want to consider the more valuable “whats” we might trample in our desperation. What virtues, what values, what principles mark and guide good citizens of a healthy society? And what vicious, what detrimental, what unprincipled antitheses are symptomatic of the sick?

It may help to consider Plato’s maxim on the subject: “Live in such a way that, if everyone in society were to live in that same way, that would be a society in which you would want to live.” With his maxim as our motto, let’s make this “The Year that Shall Be Named.”

Matt Myers,

Washougal