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Fostering shelter cats
keeps them safe
Re: “Critics: Cats at shelter in peril” (Page A1, Sept. 24).
I read the article in the paper Sept. 24 and agree that animal care at the San Jose Animal Care Center is poor.
I’ve been in the kitten room dozens of times. Kittens are in cages with dirty litter, unchanged water, old food and poop on their fur. Once we fostered a pair of kittens that were five days overdue on their needed medicine. We fostered them for a month and found them a nice home. We recently fostered a kitten and saved its life. When we picked it up, we were told it was eating on its own. We brought it home and it refused to eat. We fed it through a syringe for a week. It would have died at SJACC.
The care at the SJACC is poor. The city needs to hire professional management, more veterinarians and veterinary technicians. We will continue to foster to help kittens.
Audrey Sitter
San Jose
Enforce decorum
at board meetings
Re: “Board chair goes on offensive after flap over Pride flag” (Page A1, Sept. 21).
Public attention is focused on the matter of an LGBTQ flag display at a public school and related issues. But this is not the only serious question that is involved.
Proper conduct of public meetings and interruptions by adherents of both sides of the controversy are also of concern. The First Amendment guarantees “the right of the people to peaceably assemble” for “redress of grievances.” My experience is that most people at public meetings are well-behaved and attentive and are present to listen, learn and perhaps offer their own opinions. These properly-behaved people are being denied their constitutional rights.
The solution is to ban disrupters from further meetings, and also ban board members who disobey the Constitution, the law and the rules of procedure. A remedial course in high school civics should also be required for those banished.
John Cormode
Mountain View
New gun law a step
toward controlling guns
Re: “Newsom’s tougher gun laws include a new tax” (Page A1, Sept. 27).
Lobbyists and advocate groups like the California Rifle and Pistol Association have misled many into thinking there is no alternative to the dangerous laissez-faire gun culture we have in the United States.
The bill signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday is indeed a step toward breaking the vicious cycle that persists regarding gun violence, and as we’ve seen the truth in Texas and Florida, more access to guns is not the solution.
In contrast, community resources and crisis intervention have proven effective for violent crime prevention in the United States and beyond. It is refreshing to see this initiative has teeth as well, where many California bills go to law with the claim of effective change and no real plan to execute it.
Saturn Williams
San Jose
Legal system can help
resolve Trump candidacy
Re: “Kicking Trump off California’s ’24 ballot is misguided approach” (Page A6, Sept. 21).
A candidate for president can’t run for office who previously engaged in insurrection, according to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Therefore, any brave secretary of state who finds Donald Trump indeed tried to overturn the last election by force, will simply be passing the matter on to our courts to be decided fairly in accordance with rules of evidence and other legal guideposts.
Would this impress anyone currently itching to vote for Trump? No, but Trump has plainly shown he wouldn’t respect an election loss no matter what, and many of his supporters will always believe him when he (always) cries foul.
With our future as a democracy hanging in the balance, it’s time now for secretaries of state and our courts to do their jobs. “Let the voters decide” is not a democratic impulse in this instance; it’s a cop-out.
Lisa Lampros
San Jose
DeJoy should not be
serving as postmaster
It’s absurd that Louis DeJoy is still on the USPS Board of Governors, still corrupt with massive conflicts of interest, still dismantling mail sorting machines and throwing wrenches in the USPS to privatize it, with no legal mandate to do so.
Louis DeJoy is not acting in the best interests of the people and, in fact, appears to be engaged in a nefarious, potentially criminal, conspiracy to enrich himself and harm a legally directed public agency. This should have stopped years ago. Get DeJoy off the Board of Governors, and in front of a judge and jury for conspiracy.
Mathew Clark
Campbell
Give opportunity, not
money for reparations
Re: “Reparations violate U.S. code of law” (Page A6, Sept. 28).
Pete Campbell makes a sterling point that American law, based on individual rights, does not hold a person responsible for the sins of other persons or groups. I hope it’s upheld by the Supreme Court in the case of monetary reparations for ancestral slavery.
Whatever we owe Black people, it isn’t money. No one is worse off than from whence we came.
The moral debt we owe to Black people should not involve money transfer, which is very divisive.
On the other hand, reparations in the form of equal citizenship rights and equal opportunity can be derived on a cooperative and mutually beneficial basis. Equality will not come from shared money, but from sharing opportunity.
Fred Gutmann
Cupertino
Source: www.mercurynews.com