Young adults, let your voices be heard
Taking the first step to vote can be challenging. As a young person, it poses even more challenges. But, young people (18-29) are the largest and most diverse group of potential voters in our country, yet we vote at the lowest rate.
If young people are not participating in the political process, elected officials will not prioritize our values and issues. We need to end this cycle of mutual neglect and demonstrate how the youth can shape the future of our country. Seven in 10 young voters fail to turn in a ballot on election day.
Universities need to take on a larger role promoting civic engagement on campus and getting their students registered and out to vote. If you aren’t registered or have moved since the last time you registered to vote, you can update your registration here: arizonastudentvote.org. Let’s get out to vote this fall and turn out the youth at historic rates!
Jennifer Manning
Downtown
Old Tucson can return bigger and better
Everyone has an opinion on Old Tucson. Here’s mine, as someone whose first acting job was at Old Tucson and as the vice president of the Screen Actors Guild in Arizona. We have the opportunity to bring it back as an iconic film studio, as envisioned by its founder Bob Shelton, and a popular tourist destination much like Biosphere 2.
It is not an amusement park. It is not a large venue for concerts or a water park. It is a movie lot.
It needs to have nonprofit status and a board similar to that of the Desert Museum. It needs to have at least one sound stage built. It needs to involve the UA Film School and other acting groups and production companies in Southern Arizona to create the Tucson Movie Studios, recognizing and preserving the past of the Western films genre and teaching and producing the entertainment of today and tomorrow.
Done right, it can be bigger and better than Shelton could have ever imagined.
Matt Welch
East side
Thanks owed to Tucson mayor, council
Southern Arizona can be especially proud of, and grateful to, Tucson’s mayor and City Council but also students of the University of Arizona’s Honor College, the Arizona Youth Climate Coalition and Students for Sustainability. On Sept. 9, Tucson’s leadership formally declared a climate emergency, as other cities are doing globally.
Climate change is real, human-caused and poses catastrophic consequences for all future interdependent life. In fact, those catastrophic consequences have happened and are happening.
Humans may well be the most advanced species of life ever to exist on Earth, but we are also unquestionably its most destructive species, too — and it might well be that humans have become far more destructive than advanced. Exceptions include those activists and people actionably supportive of them, listed above.
On behalf of Elders Climate Action, Climate Tucson, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Local First Arizona and other concerned and related communities, thank you Mayor Regina Romero.
Mark Cook
Northwest side
Trump doesn’t deserve the support of veterans
I am an Air Force veteran. The insults and disrespect that Donald Trump has directed at veterans both living and dead are well known, so I won’t waste time repeating them.
I am amazed at the number of veterans who still continue to support him given what he has said about us. I’ve come to believe that Trump could urinate on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and many veterans would still continue to support him.
I say that because in 2016 Trump said he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue in New York City and shoot someone and his supporters would still stay with him. Sadly, I think that statement is one of the few true statements he has ever made.
John Tianen
Foothills
