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Using public money
for ballpark a bad idea
Re. “County offers tentative ballpark support,” Page A1, Oct. 28:
I cannot grasp why Alameda County would want to build another massive stadium. We already have a basketball arena that is no longer being used by the team we hold so dear. The football team that shared the stadium with the A’s has abandoned us and moved to Las Vegas. It’s far too late to commit to creating a brand new stadium, especially when we will be displacing the individuals that the stadium’s income should have supported in the first place.
Yes, the A’s being in Oakland is something that has historical significance, but we have issues now that could be solved with the money that would be dedicated to the construction of the structure. If the Athletics want to stay in the Bay Area, they should seek either private investors or ask the county to use a smaller amount of money to do a renovation of the Coliseum.
Nicholas Kincaid
Castro Valley
State should revisit
vets aid-in-dying policy
After reading the article regarding veterans in California being forced to leave their homes to seek aid in dying (“State’s vets challenge aid-in-dying evictions,” Page A1, Oct. 25), I am very much concerned.
Being in a family that is rooted with veterans who served in the wars and other family members who are still of service to this country, this is concerning. With this happening, it is no longer a longshot to have a future where veterans are no longer retiring in California and we don’t celebrate their honored services.
If it’s not too late, the state should look into the policy and find a neutral ground that doesn’t take away from terminally ill veterans.
Alexander Icasiano
San Lorenzo
Racial insensitivity
still plagues education
After reading the article about the Riverside math teacher caricaturing Native Americans (“Riverside teacher placed on leave after video mimicking Native Americans goes viral,” Oct. 21), this made me realize how ignorance and racial insensitivity occur anywhere, even within learning institutions.
Her representation of Native Americans while repeatedly shouting, “SohCahToa” reveals how racial stereotypes toward indigenous people are still present in America. There are other ways to help students memorize the three main ratios used in trigonometry without disrespecting other people’s culture. This way of teaching will lead to even greater issues of racial injustice and discrimination in education. The teacher’s behavior encourages the youth to tolerate racism and cultural appropriation.
Racist behavior such as this should not be tolerated. Further improvements in the training programs for teachers will be necessary in order to increase awareness of racism and inappropriate behavior and build an anti-racist education system.
Katherine Vergara
Vallejo
Single-payer plan would
save U.S. health care
Thanks to Robert Pearl for his op-ed (“The state of American health care: Climbing from world’s worst to first,” Page A8, Oct. 21) adding to the avalanche of condemnation of our health care system which costs twice as much as other advanced countries but delivers the poorest outcomes in terms of life expectancy, infant and maternal mortality, and preventable deaths per capita.
What will spur voters to reject the failures of our status quo and pivot to a system like those successfully serving people in other advanced countries? Enjoying better health will require learning about and then reinventing U.S. health care, which is mainly obtained through employment, delivered by beleaguered professionals, has unreasonably high drug prices and increasingly monopolistic hospital networks charging unregulated fees, and wastes more than $200 billion every year under the domination of profit-seeking insurance companies.
We need the game-changing advantages of a single-payer health care system as explained in “Medicare for All, A Citizen’s Guide” by Drs. Abdul El-Sayed and Micah Johnson (Oxford University Press).
Kandea Mosely
El Cerrito
Columnist ignores that
rich are already taxed
In “Tax the rich. Help kids. It’s American tradition.” (Page A9, Oct. 27 ), its writer Paul Krugman makes these general assertions, but in ways that I think are inaccurate.
First, we already do tax the rich. We have a system of progressive taxation that results in our government getting the vast percentage of its revenue from the rich. (What exactly is their “fair share”?)
Second, it has long been the American tradition to make education public to all its children. The more government has become involved in public education, the more it seems to have gone way downhill. I suspect that the last things teachers need are more public funds and the resulting program requirements that have very little to do with developing basic learning skills in their students.
Daniel Mauthe
Livermore
Source: www.mercurynews.com