Letters to the Editor - Banding together for the common good and security - Banding together for the common good and security

I don’t wish to dissuade you from purchasing and installing an effective security alarm system. With the mounting rate of crime and break-ins, we need to feel and be safer. It’s gotten so bad it seems like only the latest technology will help, no matter what the price. Can we trust only in technology to protect us?

    Technology changes rapidly, to say the least! Twenty years ago, I toured the J. J. Hill House in St. Paul, where once resided the founder of the Great Northern Railroad. That house was designed and built on the basis of the most advanced technology 100 years ago, and what does this mansion have all around it but a thick and high wall of defense? And whom did J. J. Hill want to keep out? Maybe even some of your own forefathers!

    The defense technology of the J. J. Hill House is obsolete today, and our latest security systems will become obsolete soon. What is the lesson in this history for us, grappling with our crime and security problems right at home here and now?

    There’s something powerful about people banding together as friends for the common good. Banding together means working politics, organizing block clubs, and engaging the cooperation between community, police and courts. I would like to challenge our churches, synagogues, mosques, schools and ethical societies to keep up and not let down on instructing our offspring, as well as us seniors, on decent social and moral behavior. You’re in the band, too!

John  Bispala

Webber-Camden