LETTERS
TRUE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT

To the editor:

Now that the Festival of Trees is all packed away for another year, I would like to take this opportunity to publicly thank the McMorrow family, Rick, Ursula and Ethan, for their amazing generosity.

When I discovered that the engine of my train, on display at the Festival, was unfortunately broken at the opening party, Ethan happened to be standing by. Without hesitation he offered to loan me his 1948 Lionel engine. The next day Rick went through their boxes of trains in the basement and found the engine, which we then hooked up to my train at the museum.

Thanks to the McMorrows, hundreds of children on Nantucket were not denied the joy of seeing the train sweep around the track. Indeed, all of the young-at-heart who came to the Festival had a chance to enjoy the Christmas Village, complete with the train, again this year.

So when you are in the Camera Shop over the holiday season, please take a moment to thank the McMorrows for their amazing generosity and for bringing the real meaning of Christmas to so many.

- Linda Hoey

Mayor, Christmas Village

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE FROM OIL

To the editor: The financial constraints in the economics of election, the personal greed, and the massive spending and largesse to the oil lobby has positively guaranteed that we have thoroughly compromised all integrity in addressing this issue. The entire country is being held hostage in this oil economy. The candidates - including the President - have refused to give more than lip service to that which is the most crucial, critical issue of our time!

Our only hope, therefore, will be to find those who can be leaders in mustering a mushrooming grass roots involvement who can demand action from those who currently govern and those who are striving to assume control.

We need to elect a Kennedy-like Commander in Chief who will state, "The United States is starting a war which will eradicate our dependency on oil!" We need a leader to proclaim that our country will shift into war footing in order to make the massive investments in alternative fuel technologies such as hydrogen, battery,ethanol, solar and wind while also demanding defined, prescribed, efficiencies in everything that uses or consumes oil. Under Presidential and Congressional directive, we would go on a war footing and mandate the implementation of methodology and distribution stations for hydrogen based fuel, simultaneously, advise the world that we will immediately increase production at the Iraq fields, demand that Iraqi oil revenue support its own rebuilding as well as provide reimbursement for our ongoing costs in Iraq, and finally, inform all - that we will open our own reserves during this dramatic transition.

You can believe that just such a declaration will cause oil futures to implode, put a crimp on inflated oil revenues, cut back on the surplus monies being pumped into those economies whose aspirations are at loggerheads with ours, give our consumers a slight respite from the financial drain we are experiencing, allow our economy to absorb the cost of research and implementation necessary to launch us into oil independence and - finally - be harbinger to the health and recovery of our future generations.

Iraq's oil sold at around $37 dollars per barrel just before we invaded. Now the price remains around $90 per barrel. Our army has spent years protecting the integrity of Iraq oil fields. Should we not also assume that their fields have increased production, and are able to generate massive increases in export of product and revenues? Strangely, Iraq seems to the only Middle East area that is not awash in oil revenues! Russia and the Middle East are flooded in dollar oil revenue and are flexing their financial muscle worldwide. We are slipping deeper into debt, individually and nationally. The dollar is dropping precipitously, and those countries with ever expanding dollar surpluses are accelerating the use of their inflated revenues to invest and gain control of our vital industries.

The economics of present day politics only insures that oil interests will continue to be protected - unless voters demonstrate with massive involvement that they will accept no less than leaders who will endorse only those ready to unshackle us.

The usurious profits that are generated are being used to compromise and undermine the very foundation of the free world. Russia has used its burgeoning revenues to regain much of the destabilizing agenda that we spent years combating. Saudi Arabia and the other Middle Eastern oil producers use their massive incomes to promote and maintain the turmoil on the one hand, while they invest their ever expanding surpluses in buying control of our vital industries, and with the other hand, bestow largesse to those who govern us to gain favorable considerations. With its oil revenues, Venezuela is converting what little democracy there is in South America into political dictatorship. In the interim we see that the oil conglomerates have not used their obscene windfalls to invest in a new hydrogen distribution system nationwide to assure the solvency of our future generations, but instead they have expanded the gratuities, of which they liberally bestow to those who resist any forward movement toward divestiture from that which now has almost completely emasculated the economy.

Let us start the Declaration of Independence from Oil - right here on Nantucket - using the Internet as our Paul Revere. Write me at Gene4124@aol.com

with your thoughts and let me know! I

- Gene Ratner

Nantucket