Regarding Joe Wessels’ column “Cutting the Safety Net” (issue of April 8), I’d like to respond to his comment “handing out money over and over again to those who take and never think about changing themselves is flat-out criminal.”   

Many of you, at least a dozen, know my work as a music journalist for CityBeat and a variety of regional and national publications — some actually still in business — but virtually no one knows I’m also a musician of some discernible skill. I’ve never been in a band nor played out, though.  

News about death keeps piling up. Anyone perusing the daily newspaper or the 11 p.m. TV newscasts lately knows about the 13-year-old SCPA student killed while jogging and the 11-day-old baby squeezed to death by his young parents in Batavia. My eye happened on a small item in The Enquirer about a 16-year-old in Over-the- Rhine arrested on suspicion of committing two murders 10 days apart.