Dear Editor:

Once again our leaders are showing us that while they always have plenty of money for the wealthy and war, they hardly ever have anything for the poor.

Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy, in his proposed 2009 county budget, wants to cut funding from $50,000 to zero for the already beleaguered Gerald Ryan Outreach Center at Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal Catholic Church in Wyandanch. This is a center that serves some 600 families a month in one of the county's poorest areas. The bilingual center helps struggling families with food, clothing, afterschool tutoring, a summer camp for children and a wide variety of other services. Eliminating county support would be yet another devastating blow to a much-needed agency, which is still trying to recover from a horrible fire that ravaged its facilities late last year.

What makes this an even more bitter pill to swallow, though, is that Levy's budgetary ax is coming down on the lowly, bare-bones Gerald Ryan Center at a time when our Congress is handing over $700 billion in taxpayer monies to the millionaire Wall Street robber barons whose greed has driven the world to the brink of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Then there's another nearly $700 billion being given to the military this year. That includes an additional $170 billion for the wars-without-end in Iraq and Afghanistan in which our soldiers are killing and dying on behalf of a violently intolerant Islamic theocracy in the former and a kleptocratic narcostate in the latter.

Now, of course, one can't lay the blame for the abysmally corrupt Wall Street bail-out and our misbegotten Middle East wars on Steve Levy's shoulders. But you'd hope that a local leader like Levy would do a lot better job of looking out for the local folks, especially the most vulnerable ones, when our Washington pols have such grossly misplaced priorities.

Kevin O'Neill

West Babylon A parishioner at Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal and volunteer at the Gerald Ryan Center