Sudden cardiac arrest can strike at any time so you never know when you might be someone’s only chance for survival.  It is important that calling 9-1-1, performing CPR, and using an automated external defibrillator (AED) be an instinctive response.  Unfortunately, for most Americans, that reaction is not second nature.

More than 166,000 Americans, many of whom are in the prime of their lives, suffer sudden cardiac arrest each year. Sadly, only five percent of them survive.

In 2007, working closely with the American Heart Association, the American Red Cross, and the National Safety Council, we introduced legislation, unanimously passed in December, making the first week in June National CPR and AED Awareness Week. We felt this was necessary because there is so much more we can all be doing to help save lives.

As policymakers, we must continue to implement and support programs that make AEDs more accessible and improve our monitoring of sudden cardiac arrest.  As individuals, we must become trained in performing CPR and using an AED, and encourage our staff to do so as well.

Washington

Learn from others’ immigration policies

From Yeh Ling-Ling, executive director, Diversity Alliance for a Sustainable America

As an immigrant who used to prepare immigration applications, I wish to respond to your article “Illegals haunt McCain” (May 22).

The way to deal with illegals here is to enforce our immigration laws as strictly as Mexico does, and not seek financial help from the federal government whose tax dollars come from hardworking Americans, many of whom are struggling to make ends meet.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and other presidential candidates should be reminded that the U.S. is broke. We cannot keep borrowing from China, Japan, the United Arab Emirates and many other countries to finance our current needs. We cannot keep massively exporting jobs and importing workers!

The U.S. should model China’s legal immigration policy instead of feeling threatened by the fast-rising Chinese economic power.

Oakland, Calif.

Beware of the word ‘emergency’

From M.L. Pinkard

(Regarding article “Senate panel adds immigration measure to Iraq supplemental,” May 15.) Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) insistence that a mass illegal alien amnesty for wealthy agribusiness “is an emergency situation” — attached to war funding, no less — echoes Harold McGraw III’s Emergency Committee for American Trade pushing the Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

Any such urgency exists merely in the minds of the one-world elitists touting de facto unions with Central and South America using NAFTA, CAFTA, the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, and the as-yet unrealized Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

Truth is, none of these supposed solutions —amnesties, free trade, or partnership agreements involving corrupt Third World countries that violate basic human rights — have ensured Americans or those in the respective countries their basic livings. The foreign businesses NAFTA and CAFTA were supposed to enrich have found themselves blindsided, while Americans’ lives are more crime-ridden and impoverished.

Beware of the word “emergency” on the lips of politicos and their commerce bed-partners. It simply means they’re in an unholy hurry — for themselves, of course.

Lafayette, Calif.