Limit Walmart’s impact on serenity of rural Georgia
My family farm is two miles from Walmart’s new 1.5-million-square-foot distribution center in Franklin County. For my entire life, I’ve stepped outside at night, seen the stars and heard little more than katydids, frogs and crickets.
Soon, acres of lights, loading areas and hundreds of trucks will join that landscape.
While decisions can still be made, I’m asking Walmart to use fully shielded, warm lighting; dim empty parking areas overnight; limit truck idling; thoughtfully locate loading docks and staging areas; and use substantial buffers and berms to contain light and noise.
These are reasonable requests for a company with Walmart’s resources.
Gov. Brian Kemp: You grew up working on a farm outside Athens. Georgia Department of Economic Development Commissioner Pat Wilson: You grew up here in Franklin County. You know the rural Georgia I’m asking you to protect — the farms, quiet and dark night skies that shaped our childhoods. Please use your influence now to ensure progress doesn’t erase what makes these communities worth calling home. Please prove my fears wrong.
“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” —The Lorax.
CAROLEE COKER, CARNESVILLE
Vaccines have saved thousands of lives
In 1955, my brother, age 17, and sister, age 20, died of bulbar polio within three weeks of each other. This was before the polio vaccine was available throughout the country.
As a former docent at Historic Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta, I can report that of the 78,000 people buried there, one-third are children. They died of contagious diseases such as diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, measles, smallpox, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, polio, rheumatic fever and influenza, among other preventable illnesses.
This occurred in the 1800s and before the 1950s, before science developed vaccines and antibiotics, which were then regularly used and required. Thousands of lives have been saved.
For some reason, in the last 20 years, misinformed or willfully ignorant people have joined the bandwagon of anti-vaccines.
The premature deaths of my sister and brother could have been prevented if the polio vaccine had been available. Their deaths destroyed my parents.
MARY RABON MOORE, BROOKHAVEN
Lake America spells SHAME
Seventy years ago or so, in preparation for a junior high school geography exam, I learned the mnemonic for the Great Lakes: HOMES (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior).
President Donald Trump, by executive order, despite ongoing inflation, a stalemated war in the Middle East, and souring relations with allies, especially Canada, renames Lake Ontario to Lake America. The new mnemonic: SHAME.
JEFFREY KOHLMAN, JOHNS CREEK
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