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Lottery numbers for the week of March 13

Letter to the Editor: Let’s see more compromise, and less complaining, from Democratic crew in Harrisburg

Don&#8217;t be afraid of &#8220;others.&#8221;A guest speaker at Wilkes University last week encouraged audience members not to distance themselves from, or discount the lives of, people who might be deemed different because of their language, culture or country of origin. This kumbaya-like notion collides with much of the nation&#8217;s political rhetoric lately, but it&#8217;s essential to success, author and activist Mary Fisher suggested.Her point shouldn&#8217;t be dismissed as a bleeding-heart liberal&#8217;s plea for one world government. It is not.Fisher, a Republican who worked in President Gerald Ford&#8217;s administration, was targeting her words to attendees Wednesday at the university&#8217;s Allan P. Kirby Center Lecture in Enterprise and Entrepreneurship. The globe&#8217;s most successful entrepreneurs, Fisher said, won&#8217;t be constrained by geographic barriers, but rather seek to build customer bases and forge partnerships wherever they can be found and as fast as the World Wide Web can link them.Shut out strangers, stunt your opportunities. Snooze, lose.The same logic, incidentally, applies to this nation and the Greater Wyoming Valley.Unfortunately, Archie Bunker-type mentalities still persist across certain pockets of Northeastern Pennsylvania, as indicated by the recent growth of hate groups in the region. Some people apparently haven&#8217;t learned from the area&#8217;s sorry legacy of shunning new arrivals to the anthracite fields.On a lesser scale, perceptions about &#8220;others&#8221; even cause unwarranted divisions among Luzerne County&#8217;s municipalities. During the late 1960s, for instance, proposing to send students from Plymouth to a single high school with teens from Pringle and other places, practically considered foreign to one another, sent certain residents into histrionics.Fast forward to today, and it&#8217;s evident that not everyone wants to roll out the welcome mat for newcomers from Peru. Ditto for workers who get to our cities by way of Dubai and Damascus.In Fisher&#8217;s words, however, &#8220;The &#8216;other&#8217; disappears when we are all colleagues.&#8221;Admittedly, Fisher, while speaking on a university campus, was preaching to the multicultural choir. Wilkes attracts Saudi students and increasingly plans to make inroads in Panama and other Central and South American nations. Similarly, King&#8217;s College, also in downtown Wilkes-Barre, has started reaching beyond the U.S., increasing its international student population since 2014 from a scant one to about 100.&#8220;This is one way to bring the world to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania,&#8221; the Rev. John Ryan, president of King&#8217;s, recently told the Times Leader Opinion Board.Officials say the recruitment efforts dovetail with the institutions&#8217; missions of supplying a liberal arts education primarily to regional residents, some of whom might never have a chance to study abroad. There&#8217;s also an economic incentive. Because of a shrinking number of traditional college-age Pennsylvanians in the coming decade, the institutions are turning elsewhere to keep enrollments steady.The bottom line: For reasons from the monetary and moral to the purely demographic, our communities will continue to change. &#8220;Others&#8221; will visit and make their homes here.For the sake of all involved, let&#8217;s strive to make sure in our households and workplaces that appreciating the inherent benefits of this trend isn&#8217;t an academic exercise, but an actual one.

Our Opinion: Don’t let a fear of ‘others’ rob you – or this region – of opportunities