Showing victims may change discourse
It is time we show photos of the victims in school shootings. The general public needs to see what horror these cowards are causing with access to the types of guns and bullets being used. Gruesome pictures of helpless gunned down students may be the last hope to get mother’s and kids to demand change; to purge this country of weapon’s only intended to be used in war.
Barry Soble
Sequim
This isn’t a dump
In case you didn’t know, there is a new free drop off of old mattresses, lawn mowers, refrigerators, sofas, and anything else you want to leave on Brownfield Road. There is also a free pick up service there. The City of Sequim will come by and pick up all that trash for free! But seriously folks … something needs to be done about this. Maybe a security camera can be mounted out there. I know when the young man who lived in his RV there for three or four months, no one left any trash.
My guess is people leave trash there because they don’t have the money to dispose of it properly because it does cost to get rid of these large items. Maybe there can be an official drop off place that is free. After all, it is free right now but right out in the open for all to see.
Pauline Geraci
Sequim
How does this happen?
A baby boy is born in 1952. A boy, a boy, thank God, a boy! This child will carry on the family name. For eons, this proclamation of the birth of male children has reigned in human cultures around our planet. In the Queens borough of New York City, it is repeated, with high hopes for a tiny child. He grows, appears healthy, is educated and graduated, eventually becoming one of the most powerful men in the Hollywood film industry: Harvey Weinstein.
Like too many rich, dominant men who hold the lives of their employees in their gold-laden hands, he allegedly uses his prestige and brute force to sexually assault more than 50 women. Shocked, traumatized and humiliated, tens of these women experience shattered careers and lives.
Again, women raise our voices in outcry, this time with the robust, determined “Me, Too” movement; not in weakness, but generated in the ancient molecules of our DNA; born from fear, subservience, threats, violence; sprouted into first words, “Me, Too” — declaring opposition to a most hideous, gender-biased inheritance.
But the elites don’t hold dominion. As our country is rocked with constant community and school mass shootings, the apparently powerless men also seek entitlement to violence to express their emotions and beliefs; 94 percent of these killings are committed by boys and men. Their excuses – from wanting the rest of us to “learn my story” to hate-inspired white supremacists, to down-home “patriots” mired in conspiracy theories, to the bullied – thinking their pain warrants mutilating others, to ideologues believing their religion should dominate – are as varied as the individual guys.
Yet, their similarities mark them: usually white, irrationally angry, hateful, delusional, sour, self-important murderers.
The difference between the rest of us and these abusers and killers resides in our humility and conscience, our willingness to reflect upon and control our motives and actions, a resilience to overcome rejection and life’s hurdles. Our compassion and desire to live in happiness.
How does this transformation of an innocent baby to a malignant man happen? It’s simply a matter of deciding – to destroy, or to understand and respect.
Gayle Brauner
Port Angeles
