Letters from Jan. 26, 2008

Job fair

MLK would be proud of efforts

I’d like to think that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would be proud of what the nonprofit Washington Reading Corps did this Monday in Bremerton.

Fifty-five people showed up to get information about college programs, apply for jobs, submit résumés and find out about job-training opportunities for a career resource and job recruitment event hosted by the WRC teams at Naval Avenue Early Learning Center and Armin Jahr Elementary School.

The WRC teams at West Hills Elementary School and View Ridge Elementary School received about 650 total donations of toys, baby items, personal hygiene items, canned food and dried goods on Monday, which they dropped off at the St. Vincent’s de Paul Assistance Office, the Bremerton Food Line and West Park Community Center.

Not only were both projects successful, they showed Bremerton citizens that people do care about this city succeeding.

And that’s the funny thing: The success of both projects relied just as much on other people as it did on us WRC members. People were more than happy to help us get out the word about the career resource event. Organizations and employers willfully signed on en masse and helped in whatever capacity they could to make it successful.

By stationing themselves at Kitsap-area stores, West Hills and View Ridge WRC members talked to myriad individuals who happily came back out of those stores with arms full of donations.

There are a lot of people who like to complain about Bremerton’s problems, yet they sit there waiting for someone else to do something about it.

I think King said it best when he declared, “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”

It’s easy to stridently clamor. But like people did this Monday, let’s all try making that silence not so appalling. That’s what Bremerton needs.

Riley Bauling

Bremerton

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