REMOVING THE FIRE RINGS IN NEWPORT BEACH

The Beach is a place for youth, for families, for fun and frolicking, for surfing and swimming, for babes and bikinis. For nightly fires and music and songs. Now the City of Newport Beach wants to take away the fire rings.

Who are the residents who moved there fully aware that the fire rings were there, and now want them gone because of "air pollution"? Do they take an early morning swim before going to work? Or grab their surf board after work and catch a wave?

The Beach is a resource that belongs to the people of the State of California - to enjoy. Not to be restricted by rules by people of my generation who have outgrown their youth and their tolerance for the antics of the beach - and the beach if full of antics!!

I grew up at the beach as a child. I would get up - grab my boat and water ski all day - play at the beach and have lots of fun. My dad had a huge bell mounted on a pole that he rang so we knew when it was time to come home for dinner.

I have always said I would live in a closet at the beach rather than live inland - at times my living space wasn't much bigger than a closet.

Now I am 65 and the noise, the traffic, the music, the confusion and everything that comes with beach living does not always appeal to me. So I moved inland. I still visit the beach and I jokingly tell my friends who are still there that my current neighbors must all be in the "witness protection program'. It is that quiet. However, the quiet, the peace, the pool outside my back door all fit my life style as an older adult.

Don't take out the fire rings - let another generation of people enjoy what we did. The beach was never meant to be a place of silence. Don't use the fire rings to get rid of "certain elements" at the beach. Try and remember how much fun the beach was when you were young.

Besides that juicy steak on your plate is far more likely to kill you than any small amount of "air pollution" from a fire ring.

POST OFFICE CLOSINGS and OTHER JOBS

Why is the Balboa Island Post Office, Post Offices all Over America and Postal Delivery Service in danger of being closed, modified or discontinued altogether? The people that staff these post offices and deliver your mail have middle class jobs—jobs that pay a good wage. Jobs that cannot be outsourced to China. Jobs for people who buy houses, support our schools, pay taxes, and spend money in our local communities.

Think about it - why is the post office going away? Because everyone uses e-mail and faxes to send us bills, bank statements, price lists, direct deposits to bank accounts, flyers, etc. Because we pay our bills online. What if we tell all our vendors and employers that they have to MAIL everything? They will tell you that is a lot of work.

I will tell you what is a lot of work— undoing identity theft. Leaving all your banking information at sites all over the internet is an incredible risk - the Chinese and other third world countries have legions of people trying to access our bank sites - and they will. Because the banks don’t really care. Fighting identity theft will take a lot of time - years actually. For you—NOT the banks—they don’t care because they don’t have to do the work that comes with identity theft. It isn’t THEIR problem.

Stop complaining about job loss in the United States to immigrants - support the jobs that we have in this country already—use the post office as much as you can. These middle class jobs that can be saved by each American spending a little more time paying their bills. And there are plenty of programs out there that let you print your checks quickly and easily and save all the information in one place - Quicken and Quick Books just to name a couple.

There are other jobs involved as well—jobs printing those checks by companies who sell them, jobs sending out the checks here in the United States , jobs opening the envelopes with your payments in them and jobs entering the information into computers. Let’s support jobs for people—not computers.

If you think it won’t affect you—your job WILL be the next one to be outsourced—guaranteed!!! It started with the factory jobs, now the middle class jobs—next the white collar jobs and eventually even your CEO will live in India. We have had factories all over the world for centuries. Accounting can be done in a foreign country just as well as in California or Kansas. Stand up and be an American and support jobs in this country and one of our oldest institutions—the United States Post Office!!!

It takes small steps to do big things—and this is something you can do to change the world!!!