The mail
RACISM?OR CRIME?
In “Bridging the Racial Divide,” City Councilman Dana Miller
speculates that the reason businesses are reluctant to set up shop in the 19th
Ward is racism.
Could be. Or — who knows? —
maybe it’s the random crackle of gunfire in the streets; deadly drive-bys;
street-corner muggings, sometimes in broad daylight; potential merchants scared
stiff; potential customers scared stiff; storefront stickups; drug deals going
down; the occasional murder. Stuff like that.
That same paragraph alludes, in an impressively bland
phrase, to the “rugged urbanism” of parts of the Ward and notes that “violent
crime and drug activity have blighted the neighborhood’s main commercial
arteries.” Perhaps Councilman Miller would agree that this “rugged urbanism” is
hardly a welcoming prospect to the Mom-and-Pops and Macys and Penneys of our land.
But not to worry.Rochester
has done what Rochester always does
when this or that evil begins to threaten records: we’ve launched a Task Force!
So God’s in his heaven and all’s right in Rochester.
Seriously, though. There’s no quick solution to the current
problem, which is certainly not just a 19th Ward problem and even more
certainly not primarily a law-enforcement problem.
But here’s a whisper in the councilman’s ear: There is a
long-term solution. It’s parents, sir. Good, strong,
caring, available parents.
Peter Dzwonkoski, Westmoreland Drive, Rochester
BEYOND THE RHETORIC
ItaloSavella
(The Mail, November 22) is concerned that the “war on terror” has never been
properly presented as a “war on fanatical Islamo-fascists”
and an expression of “the moral righteousness of our country as a fundamental
force for good.” Unwittingly, he touches on the root of this and many other
conflicts.
It is comforting to think in terms of “good” and “evil” when
confronted with the unceasing acts of cruelty and violence that pervade our
world, especially when so many of them seem senseless. When an enemy kills, we
react with outrage based on some “moral authority.” That same moral authority
salves our conscience when we kill in turn.
President Bush has written off entire nations as members of
an “axis of evil” which the forces of good must bring down. It is this very
notion of duality that is the basis of our troubles. Once we are able to view a
fellow human as evil, some sort of nefarious creature with whom we cannot
identify, we are able to take that human’s life without the revulsion that such
an act would naturally elicit.
Do we really believe that there are entire countries full of
“good” and “evil” people? Do we really believe that terrorists “hate freedom,”
as President Bush has repeatedly asserted? Or could there be something more to
the picture?
One person is killed out of self-defense, another killed out
of revenge, yet another killed to protect the lives of others, still another
killed out of prejudice and blind hatred. In each case someone is killed: the
act is defined in our minds by the motive behind it. Perhaps if we could get
over our emotional, moralistic conceptions we could dig a bit deeper and
address the underlying causes of conflict.
The “us versus them” mentality is a huge source of trouble.
Only when we are able to accept that our fellow human beings want the same
things from life that we do will we be able to engage in the kind of meaningful
dialogue that diffuses conflict rather than foments it.
Solomon Blaylock, Argyle Street, Rochester
CONSERVATIVE?
“A war on fanatical Islamo-facists….would
have required a confident and serene certainty in the moral righteousness of
our country as a fundamental force for good” (“Notes from a Somber
Conservative,” The Mail, November 22).
I was on board with the well-written letter by ItaloSavella for a little more
than a paragraph. Then the wild but not unusual distortion of the meaning of
“liberal” and “conservative” got underway. Maybe we just need to drop the terms
altogether, so we can reacquaint ourselves with having conversations instead of
food fights.
I respect conservative values that favor fiscal
responsibility, caution about entering into wars, and actually conserving the
Constitution instead of trashing it. In this, neither Mr. Savella
nor the Bush administration seems to be remotely conservative.
Mr. Savella refers to “extremists
like Pelosi and Kennedy.” The extremists here would be people like me who hate
this miserable mess of a war in Iraq.
We “vapid, effete, hate Americafirsters” worry a lot about the likelihood that
Pelosi will play the usual losing game of Democratic politics. We worry that
she will find some meaningless, “value free” middle ground that has drifted
well starboard of what was once perceived as fringy right.
While starkly absent in recent times, there do indeed exist
many examples of the US
acting as a force for good. But look at the record of recent US misadventures
in Indochina, Africa, Latin America (and less recently in the Philippines
and Cuba),
where we have too often ground both elected and unelected governments and their
people underfoot. These inconvenient realities can never support serene
certainty. No wonder so many are so effete.
Michael D. Connelly, Cypress Street, Rochester
WRITING TO CITY
We welcome and encourage readers’ letters for publication.
Send them to: themail@rochester-citynews.com or The Mail, City Newspaper, 250
North Goodman Street, Rochester14607.
Our guidelines: We don’t publish anonymous letters — and
we ask that you include your street name and city/town/village. We don’t
publish letters that have been sent to other media — and we don’t publish form letters generated by activist groups. While
we don’t restrict length, letters of under 350 words
have a greater chance of being published. We do edit letters for clarity and
brevity. And in general we don’t publish letters (or longer “op-ed” pieces)
from the same writer more often than about once every two months.
This article appears in Dec 6-12, 2006.
