White majority must
actively oppose racism
I’m a 77-year-old white male living in a virtually all-white retirement community. Over the past several years I’ve tried to educate myself on the history of slavery and racism in America. There will never be a way that we can fully make up for what has been done and is currently being done to African Americans.
What concerns me now is the silence of the white majority of my generation. Where I live, that silence is deafening. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “In the end we will not remember the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
It’s not adequate anymore to say I’m not racist. We must be anti-racist. This means we must work to change institutional policies and practices by making our voices heard by our elected officials. I hope that we, the children of the “Greatest Generation,” will not become known as the “Silent Generation.”
Jerry Fay
SaddleBrooke
Fighter-pilot senator
AWOL on pandemic
I’m a physician and I don’t understand. This nation has lost 130,000 American lives this year to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our president says we are doing great. He says we are only showing more cases because we are testing more people than any other country. More testing does not fill our ICUs and kill our fellow citizens. We have lost more than twice as many American lives as were lost in the entire Vietnam War.
Where is our fighter-pilot senator? Is she more concerned about keeping the advertising money from Trump supporters than taking care of our state? More concerned about winning an election? Why is she not in the president’s office every day with every other senator that she can get to fight to save American lives?
How can they keep saying it is a hoax? My daughter works in the Flagstaff hospital on the COVID unit. She gets to hold up the iPad so that families can say goodbye to their loved ones.
Robert Beren
Foothills
Mask up,
protect all
We have rules now about smoking, whether at work or recreation. This isn’t done to protect the smoker even if the smoker doesn’t think smoking is a health risk. It is done to protect the nonsmoker from the effects of the secondhand smoke, which is a health risk.
This is same reason why we need to wear masks. We wear masks to protect others from COVID-19 we might be carrying. We aren’t wearing masks for a political mandate. We are wearing masks because COVID-19 is a health risk to everyone.
Nancy Kabat
Foothills
Mayor Romero did indeed de-escalate
We should take the time to praise our first Latina mayor for her boldness and bravery in the face of all our national and local turmoil. Mayor Regina Romero, following several national leaders, halted the physical blue line from taking away from the real conversation of racism and injustice at the hands of police.
Clearly Romero is listening/learning from Black Lives Matter voices, street demonstrators and occupations to choose what is safe for our community. With this one action, our mayor protected our community from blatantly disrespectful attempts to minimize those local voices and confirmed that these are indeed our streets. The power of symbolism is undeniable as we watch monuments and other symbols be torn down. Here one was prevented.
As our country navigates the major shifts in consciousness in a time of a great health crisis, we must continue to support these movements and voices and not allow those who are not affected to silence our Black and Latinx leaders.
Vanessa Gallego
West side
