Support projects that benefit others

The writer of an April 24 letter (titled “Not worth the money”) who pans the federal government's assistance for the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library utters an empty whine: What's in it for me? The rationale is that if a project doesn't directly benefit him, those facts bestow upon him the ideological superiority and moral propriety to torpedo support for the project.

I won't ever suffer (I hope) from lung cancer or use a rural highway in Montana; and I haven't (sadly) yet visited any of the Smithsonian campus in Washington, D.C. But I have no qualms that my tax dollars might support disease research, a roadway or a cultural center that I never encounter.

If the writer doesn't want to visit the Czech & Slovak Museum or the African-American Historical Museum and Cultural Center of Iowa, Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, CSPS, Theatre Cedar Rapids, Children's Museum of Iowa, Johnson County Historical Society or public libraries, it's his great loss. He shouldn't make it ours.

Patrick Muller

Hills