Monday, June 23, 2003
Didn't bargain for prejudiceduring trip to garage sale
EDITOR:
Last weekend my husband and I, along with a couple of family members, decided to adventure to a neighborhood garage sale. We passed the street and came upon a man walking his dog. My husband politely asked the man if he could give us directions to the housing development. The man replied that he had never heard of the development and that it must be new.
We drove for a few minutes with my cousin following in the car behind us, then my husband turned the car around when he thought he saw a good number of cars on one street.
To our surprise, the man who was walking his dog -- the one we asked for directions -- was walking to his home on the same street that we were looking for.
At first I became angry and questioned the man's motives. But as I have experienced this in the past, I realized that he didn't want us there. What made me even more upset was that my brother and his family informed us not to go down one street because several men who were gathered at a house told them that there was no sale on that street and, not in so many words, to get off "their" street.
My brother, who is a high-ranking officer in the Army Reserves and who was with us that day, is expected to fight for our country and fight for these people who don't want him to drive on "their" streets. It's ridiculous.
These people are the first to tie a yellow ribbon around the trees in their yards and tell the world that they "support our troops," but what they don't say is that they support the troops from afar, as long as the troops, possibly the ones of color, do not come to their neighborhoods.
Thank God all of the people who participated in the sale were kind. Some said hello or good morning, or asked, "How are you?" But the offense is stilled engraved in my mind, and it's absolutely absurd that we still have to deal with the subject of prejudice in this day and age.
CYNTHIA GARCIA
Youngstown
One day America changed,and they never told us why
EDITOR:
America, the country that uses might for right, is the country that existed in my father's day.
It was the America the Beautiful that I learned to love and believe in while I was in Cub Scouts. It was when everyone who wanted to work, could, and everyone spoke English. Sometimes their English was broken, but that was OK because they were learning so they could become citizens of the United States of America.
If you ran into an item made somewhere other than the U.S.A., it was considered "junk" unless it was an English or German pocket knife. Then, it was OK.
You knew if you got good grades and stayed out of trouble you might get a good job someday when you were grown up. Most of your adventures came from the pages of Mark Twain or Boy's Life magazine, or maybe from "Highway Patrol" or "Sky King," if you could get that station.
Then, one day they shot the president and never told us why. We started hearing about a far-off war in a country with a funny name. We knew it had to be for some sort of just cause because a neighbor's son had been killed over there.
I started hearing about our dead president's little brother wanting to run for the White House and about a real smart black man named Rev. King. They shot them both that year and never said why.
I do know that somehow big business started running the war, changing the laws, running the investigations and cover-ups, and bribing trusted union officials. There are 22 million of us here in the United States who are either unemployed or under-employed. We were used, robbed of our jobs, savings, 401(k)s and pension plans as well as our America.
RONALD SLOAN
Mercer, Pa.
Despite 9/11, we must notforget what we stand for
EDITOR:
The arrest, trial and sentencing some months ago of several dozen political dissidents in Cuba brought nearly worldwide condemnation. Their crimes consisted of harboring and expressing politically dissenting views.
In trial, it was made evident that the Castro government made use of spies strategically placed in Cuban human rights groups, gathering information on intellectuals, journalists, librarians and others espousing democratic change.
In Cuba at this time, harboring and expressing politically dissenting views can be a dangerous occupation.
But Cuba is not alone in this. Intolerance of political dissent has risen dramatically in the United States. Last year, Janis Besler Heaphy, publisher of the Sacramento Bee, was booed off the stage in her commencement speech at the California State University in Sacramento when she questioned the degree to which we might be willing to curtail our civil liberties for the sake of national security.
University professors critical of the White House have been publicly accused of unpatriotic sentiments.
Even former President Carter was scorned, along with a number of other prominent Americans, in a full-page ad in the New York Times for stating that Bush's phrase "axis of evil" is "overly simplistic and counterproductive."
The Patriot Act, passed by Congress in October 2001, grants the executive branch of government unprecedented and largely unchecked surveillance powers to monitor our financial transactions, to track our e-mail and Internet usage, conduct sneak-and-peek searches and nationwide roving wiretaps, even to gather, from libraries, records of the books we read.
Today, exercising what Justice Jackson called "the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order" is quickly becoming a dangerous occupation among us.
GABRIEL PALMER-FERNANDEZ, Ph.D.
Youngstown
With similar effort, Weancould have been saved
EDITOR:
It's nice to see the Youngstown-Warren Chamber trying to get Boeing. I sure wish we at Wean United had someone like that to help us.
We tried to get someone to help. We had in good times 800-plus employees. All we had to do was refinance $10 million, of which $5 million was already refinanced. When we closed we had a $30 million order on the books.
It seems to me if these agencies in the city, county and state would help established companies more, not so many should close. Just look at the companies in our area that, with a real effort, could have been saved. I'm sure a lot more than 1,200.
It took the Italian company that bought Wean for about $12 million four years to microfilm all drawings and patents. Now they make all our machinery.
BOB SLOVKOVSKY Youngstown