Letters: April 2, 2018

Health center funding

TO THE EDITOR: I am writing in support of Congresswoman Stefanik and her recent efforts to support community health centers in our region.

For those not aware, community health centers give care to 95,000 residents of our district. The community health center fund that helps support health centers ran out of funding on Sept. 30 of last year.

The congresswoman proposed H.R. 3770, which would amend the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to grant funding to these centers through 2022, not only would close to 100,000 of our fellow New Yorker’s benefit from this bill, but so would the nearly 27 million patients nationwide that rely on these community health centers.

I am glad to see such an important issue being tackled head on, and it is great to see our congresswoman leading the charge.

With more than 200 members of Congress co-sponsoring this measure, I am hopeful that community health centers will soon have the needed, secure, funding to continue their vital services.

SCOTT A. SARTWELL

Peru

Zombies, nuclear war

TO THE EDITOR: To continue my community film series’ 50th-anniversary observances in 2018, I’m presenting a three-night retrospective of 1968’s original “Night of the Living Dead” from writer-director George Romero.

In light of today’s unfortunate numbing effect of zombie overkill (no pun intended), it’s important to consider that Romero’s classic wasn’t intended solely as a horror movie, what with underlying concerns about race relations and the whole spectrum of 1960s socio-political turbulence threatening the foundations of the American family structure.

The first screening will be at the Champlain Wine Co., 30 City Hall Place, downtown Plattsburgh on Friday, April 13. The second will be at Under One Roof Video, 267 Margaret St., on Saturday, April 14. The third screening will be on Sunday, April 15, in room 208 of Yokum Hall on the SUNY Plattsburgh campus. All three screenings will begin at 8 p.m., open to the public and free of charge.

On Saturday, April 21, we’ll be at the Newman Center, 90 Broad St., for an Earth Week double-feature addressing the ultimate threat to Mother Earth: nuclear war.

The critically acclaimed 1981 documentary “The Day After Trinity,” about the so-called Manhattan Project that created the first atomic bomb, will open the evening’s program at 7 p.m.

Following at 8:30 will be the genuinely bizarre 1958 sci-fi oddity “Cage of Doom,” whose gonzo raison-d’etre was to blame women on the fringes of the male-dominated Manhattan Project for failing to stop it. Huh? Not an opinion any rational person would share, but it sure makes for one weirdly absorbing hour at the movies.

As ever, all screenings are on good old-fashioned reel-to-reel, 16mm film.

ANDY MACDOUGALL

Plattsburgh