Editor, Gazette-Journal:

Last week’s Gazette-Journal editorial ("Trying to make it," March 28) shows we either lack memory or hope others have. What is needed to move forward may well be looking back and fixing mistakes. I reread several old letters I and others had written to the editor over the last four or five years and found nothing changes; we repeat old mistakes and like many who write, wonder why.

We lament the "brain drain" and lack of commercial interest in our area, yet after years of begging for rural high-speed internet service that would have made us more attractive, we have not moved forward one inch. We even had interested parties and managed to delay progress into extinction. Why? Who gained from it?

We beg for more property taxes when four cents could have been assessed the same year our school blew down, but it was politically unpopular. Now when school property most would not probably buy is bought and a school that can be used in a county where studen...