Letters to the Editor
Amity
Published Letters: 1110 Editor's Choice: 106
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No Real Alternative
[Read the article: We paved paradise]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]For fifteen years I didn't own a car and went everywhere I went on mass transit, under my own power or, rarely, by carpool — and it didn't work.
Even though I was living in some of the most mass-transit-friendly cities in the United States, subway delays, convoluted bus routes, chronic train breakdowns, infrequent schedules and complicated interchanges turned into an overwhelming burden of embarrassment and lost time. Eventually it became clear even to my stubborn self that my professional and personal life was suffering as the result of my devotion to mass transit. Enough was enough.
There are a few situations in my current metropolis where I'll gladly park and ride rather than fight traffic, and I often find myself wishing that all public transit value propositions were as clear-cut. But you all don't want to pay the taxes to subsidize the service, so that's just not going to happen.
So I see it as a particularly bourgeois notion that the masses need to be persuaded to take mass transit more and drive their cars less. "The masses" see that, more or less accurately, as equivalent to asking them to live in the ghetto — from which some of them have only recently won free. A few parts of a few American cities excepted, mass transit is impractical, degrading, and a sentence to socioeconomic purgatory. Anyone who says otherwise is full of romantic rubbish.
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Faith in what?
[Read the article: The 9/11 backlash against women]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]And I sort of want to tell them: Have a little faith.
It must be asked: faith in what? Americans — even thoughtful Americans like Salon writers — have been holding onto faith that this, too, shall pass for a month shy of 7 years, and at every turn, every hanging chad and Supreme Court decision and con and bedazzlement and bamboozlement we as a people have said to ourselves, "Well, it will all turn out for the best, we'll get past this."
And it has gotten worse.
So if you haven't been ready to listen to the little people who rant and rave in our tiny voices, then do listen to Springsteen. There are times when musicians and writers appear to be lone voices of alarm solely because they're the leading edge. It's like that humorous t-shirt that reads, "I am a bomb technician. If you see me running, try to keep up."
There are occasions when all that's needed for wickedness to triumph is for good people to content themselves with faith, and shrink from the courage to say out loud what's happening to them.
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Nonsense
[Read the article: Congress to New York (and Chicago and L.A.): Drop dead]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"Imagine that Mohammed Atta or one of the other 9/11 hijackers, who were in the country illegally, had a city they could reside in to plot terrorist attacks with no fear of ever being checked or deported."
This is nonsense. Why is Salon's writer even citing this as a rational defense? It scarcely even parses. Mohammed Atta was in the country and able to reside anywhere he wanted. He was a legal immigrant. It was flawed counterterrorism policy-making, at the highest levels of government — not immigration policy — that failed to catch him.
And this:
"Can you imagine anywhere else in the world where a city announces that it will not only not enforce or cooperate in enforcement of a federal law?"
also makes no sense. We live in a federalist polity, not an autarchical one. Nothing obliges the several states or the people of the United States to cooperate with federal law enforcement, and vice versa. If no other nation in the world enjoys the same separation of powers as the United States, too bad for them. And if the feds needs the locals' help for something the locals don't support, too bad for the feds.
Editor, the cited reasons are not "strong arguments." They're complete horseradish, and mask the purely demagogic motivations behind the legislation. Alex Koppelman eventually gets around to revealing this, in the last passages of his article, after sober-mindedly reviewing the claims of the debate on their face — as if they were worth consideration on their own merits. He never interrogates more deeply why legislators from rural, immigrant-labor-intensive parts of the country are attacking urban, liberal strongholds as being the root of the immigration crisis in America.