Your Question of the Week editorial involved the dispute between the city of Irwindale and David Tran's Huy Fong Food Company and its Sriracha hot sauce.
The question was, "Would Sriracha be your good neighbor?" The article went on to say that "we want the beauty parts of this world, but we'd like to skip the hassle parts we have to pass through on the way." "They want the water, but they'd just as soon do without the rain," which was a quote from American poet Ed Dorn, can go on to describe another bad neighbor relationship. That neighbor is the city of South Pasadena. For decades, South Pas has been fighting transportation progress that is sorely needed throughout the greater Los Angeles region, in the form of the Long Beach Freeway extension from Alhambra to Pasadena. Each time the more than a dozen Southern California freeways were built, sacrifices were made by cities and citizens alike but always for the greater good of all involved. I have heard some refer to this fight as David against Goliath, but in this case Goliath is the good guys. Someone needs to pick up the torch in our fight against this ongoing battle and impose sanctions against South Pasadena. Let's bring our collective efforts to bear against this tiny minority of preventers of progress.
Yes Irwindale stinks and its not from the Sriracha hot sauce. From all appearances it's coming from the four families and the City Council, who are causing all the stink. Irwindale approved the factory before the company built it there and the council knew what kind of product they were making. Were there complaints from the prior factory location? Also, how come the hundreds of factory workers aren't complaining about the pepper odors? If the odor is so bad you'd think they would be. Maybe the owner should move so the jobs, the taxes, the stink would also disappear!
As a registered nurse and a member of the larger health care community, I don't need Sen. Barbara Boxer to advise me on the toll medical errors take on patients or how the health care community needs to be more proactive in working on eliminating medical errors (AKA never events). Not a day goes by that nurses, doctors and other members of the health care community don't take steps to reduce and eliminate these tragic events.
Nursing and hospital organizations across this country have built networks too numerous to count that work cooperatively on how to address these never events.
Nurses, physicians and other members of the health care team continue to be on the front line of committees with the purpose of informing and educating hospital officials on how to best reduce and eradicate such events. Boxer couldn't get Social Security to halt its raiding of taxpayer monies for alleged overpayments, and Congress holds that agency's purse strings, so why should hospitals which she has no purview over respond to her letter?
So, I'm sure Boxer thinks she's shedding light on the issue for us, the lowly health care providers, but I think her efforts would be better spent on addressing the issues before her in Congress and on learning how to get along with her fellow members from across the aisle.
She can also make sure that her staff is responsive and respectful of constituents' needs, something that her office often fails at accomplishing.