There is a Cherokee legend where an elder tells his grandson a story about two wolves. It goes something like this. 

“Son, within all of us is a battle of two wolves. One is evil. He is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego.”  

To the Editor:

Of course the grift goes on, as GOP actions are steadily ever more unhinged and more difficult to understand unless Trump Derangement Syndrome has one believing the manbaby Trump is truly heaven-sent.

Believers, you got what you voted for: war, racism, greed, the destruction of democracy and government of the many by the few who are completely lacking in any semblance of morality.

To the Editor:

Congratulations to North Carolina Republican Sen. Tom Tillis, who said on May 21 that this “anti-weaponization” fund of $1,776,000,000 is “stupid on stilts.” Unfortunately there are pretty good people all across this country who keep their head in the dirt by refusing to watch any news, or worse yet, refuse to watch anything but the lying Fox propaganda channel. 

To the Editor:

Duke Energy’s request to the Republican-controlled N.C. Utilities Commission (The Smoky Mountain News, April 22) will increase everyone’s monthly power bills by an average of $28 per 1,000 kilowatt hours, a 15% hike. Next year, an average of $6.59 will be added to that. Over the first two years, our higher electricity bills would give Duke about $728.6 million. 

To the Editor:

I volunteered to serve during wartime. We had experienced the Cuban Missile Crisis and had military advisors training foreign nationals in Vietnam. Things escalated quickly and we found ourselves, “Neck deep in the big muddy ....” to quote the song by Pete Seeger. Our nation slowly slid into commitments that would cost thousands of young Americans their lives. 

To the Editor:

In 2016, while running for President, Donald Trump called the Iraq War “stupid.” He was right. Saddam Hussein was a vicious dictator, but the U.S. had no plan for what would happen after he was eliminated. This war was actually fought for control of Iraq’s massive oil deposits. The power vacuum in Iraq was quickly filled by Shia militias friendly to Iran — and even worse by ISIS fanatics who saw an opportunity to carve out their own territory of slavery and murder. 

The Roadless Rule Recission is genuinely so unpopular to have perhaps been inspired by a claim that Trump couldn’t possibly do anything more universally hated than gutting National Park funding, to which the president said, “Oh yeah? Hold my beer.” 

To the Editor:

On Memorial Day — a holiday that originally honored Union soldiers who died defending the principles enshrined in our Constitution and Declaration of Independence, and now encompasses all who have served these United States — my wife and I revisited my childhood haunts in Western North Carolina.

Picture this — your bottle of body wash, discarded and forgotten, now sits floating in the Pacific Ocean, mingling with millions of others in a toxic soup of waste. Like you, I toss containers into the trash without thinking twice.

To the Editor:

In answer to a reporter’s question at Mar-a-Lago on February 18 about the war in Ukraine, President Donald Trump said, as if he was speaking directly to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky: “You could have made a deal.”