Doomed
As long as corporations value profits over people and places, our forests, rivers and the natural world in general are doomed. I used to be an optimistic person, but sadly not any more. Reading this story (“Last Stands,” July 27) made me want to cry.
Santa Rosa
Appalling Service
The Forest Service are the pimps of the federal government (“Last Stands”). They “service” industry. They not only sell logging rights, they sell mineral rights, grazing rights and more. Their job is not to protect the forests, but to use them and make money off them. Most of their “protection” involves keeping the public away with use fees and closed roads and overpriced campgrounds so you do not see the extent of their pandering. Clear-cutting? No problem. If you don’t think so, go up to the Mount Shasta area and get off-road. You’ll be appalled. And if you go off-road in Oregon or Washington, you’ll just throw up.
Via Bohemian.com
Transphobia
I was disappointed to read this comment on a story (Letters, July 27) published in your newspaper: “First, Melania, regarding Menswear: yes, men do swear, but so do women, so stop staring away and talking about a stairway to menswear. And, speaking of women, I thought Caitlyn Jenner was actually a man?”
Make no mistake, this kind of language is discriminatory in nature and makes a mockery of the transgender experience. I don’t know if you are aware that there is a 41 percent attempted suicide rate in the transgender population. As a team lead and an operator for a transgender suicide hotline, I am all too familiar with this statistic. The sky-high rates are in largest part due to discrimination by family members and society in general. Thank you for contributing to this and being part of the problem. I hope that you had a good laugh at the expense of the transgender community.
Please do the community a favor and educate yourself on social issues that the LGBT community faces and work toward being inclusive and tolerant in the future.
Santa Rosa
Poetry in the Veins
Regarding David Templeton’s “Power of Poetry” (July 13): Perhaps someone should remind Templeton that poetry is truth, not “beautiful words” as he describes. That a poet spends his or her entire lifetime, 365 days a year, 24/7, transforming their lives, their loves and their world, as Rainer Maria Rilke writes, into the very blood that flows through their bodies, from which they might distill its essence in a few good lines of “blood-remembering”—that is poetry.
Windsor
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