In her April 3 letter to the editor, Lucy Kee, ECEAP Parent Vice Chair of Washington State Association of Head Start, summed up the solution to most problems we as a community and nation suffer.

Her objective letter makes me think of how at a city/county/state/nationwide level, we’re like a bad surgeon who heaps mounds of clean dressings on top of a wound while the wound festers and grows underneath.

By first turning our focus and finances toward everything it takes to raise a kid to turn out to be the productive, contributing, inspiring adult we like to dream of every child becoming, we will make a good big step for all the world to admire and want to mimic.

Instead of waging costly losing battles with drug addiction, alcohol, burglary, robbery, stabbings, shootings, murder, white and blue collar crime, we need to work to produce a society that demonstrates real strength, power, self respect and courage.

The solution is too easy and we are too blind and too weak to seek it.

Instead of drowning ourselves in battles that are rarely won, we should want to give all we’ve got to raising our kids in the way we’d like our nation to be raised.

Kids are the light of the world. Let’s help them shine.

Natala Goodman, Bellevue