Letters: No peace in future thanks to world leaders

Where is our world heading, asks a letter writer? Photo/file

I read the article in Saturday's paper by Lizzie Marvelly with interest. Her summing up of the current world leadership is on the mark.

I have been around a few more years than her and like her wonder when we are going to have a worldwide peace epidemic.

I reckon that sending people to set up a colony on Mars would only result in a outbreak of wars and in fighting, just like we have on good old earth.

I say this because America and Russia seem to be the ones who could get there.

Any life out there in the galaxy looking for a place to settle should give the earth a miss and carry on by.

Really the way things are at the moment who in there right mind would want to settle here.

I just hope that our grandchildren can experience a peaceful world .

DERECK PACKHAM
Lake Tarawera

Mental health care needs relook

I write after contemplating a recent article in the Gisborne Herald regarding dissatisfaction with the mental health sector and calls for an independent inquiry.

The overwhelmingly negative experience of the mental health system is not a new phenomenon - let us not forget that one of our most famous writers, Janet Frame, was almost lobotomised.

The system has been one of the biggest sources of oppression in our society since its invention.

An independent inquiry will funnel valuable taxpayer money into trying to change something that is fundamentally broken.

Let us first acknowledge the oppression that the system stands for and go from there.

What we need is a whole new way of treating people; not as patients, but as human beings.

KATIE-JAYNE BOARDMAN
Ngongotaha