Thursday’s Letters to the Editor

Stunning sentence

EDITOR: I was stunned to read that Juan Garnica Vigil was given probation after having four other drunken driving convictions in California, plus driving on a suspended license and driving without a required interlocking device (“Man gets probation after his fifth DUI conviction,” Feb. 28). His blood alcohol content was about four times the legal limit. No wonder we can’t control people driving drunk with a court system giving probation rather than appropriate jail time. It’s like telling a 5-year-old, “No. You can’t play your Nintendo game again,” and they go right back to what they were doing.

RICHARD SVENDSEN

Calistoga

Stoking conflict

EDITOR: What Hamas did in Israel on Oct. 7 was horrible, but what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is doing in Gaza is worse and will have long-term unintended consequences. He is motivated by rage and a need for revenge, which is understandable, but if he were thinking strategically he would realize that he can’t kill his way out of this situation. He risks provoking a larger regional conflict, and he is stoking the fires of antisemitism as much of the world turns against Israel.

PAUL SCHUMACHER

Santa Rosa

Civilian help needed

EDITOR: Several years ago, a family friend was accused of drinking alcohol at her middle school. The school resource officer interrogated her and did not allow her to call her mother for more than an hour. Already tenuously attached to school, she never returned. This girl did not need a police officer that day, she needed a caring, civilian adult. Her loss was a quiet tragedy, the type that goes largely unnoticed.

Police officers are trained law enforcement specialists and, accordingly, the costs of such positions are considerable. These officers should be on school grounds only when there is a need to address crime and safety issues. Unfortunately, they may also be a necessary daily resource when a campus is out of control, which appears to be the case in several local schools.

If we reinstate school resource officers, I hope that it is with the clear goal of soon eliminating them, when school districts have made their campuses safer. I believe this will occur when schools are staffed with a sufficient number of adults trained in child development, counseling and educational policy.

W.J. CARTER

Santa Rosa

Trump’s GOP

EDITOR: Jim Gallagher nailed it (“Fallen principles,” Letters, Feb. 22). Republicans have scuttled champions of responsible Republican conservatism. Few local Republicans step out to confront the dangerous course of Donald Trump’s Republican Party.

Like the three simians hearing no evil, seeing no evil and speaking no evil, many Republicans today remain blind and silent to the noise, chaos and dangerous paths pursued by the party they’ve surrendered to Trump. They sit back, holding their noses, silently hoping he’ll somehow go away. Unless they step forward with voices, money and votes, he won’t.

The Democrats have all the elements of party platforms that used to be handled in a government of checks and balances. Instead, today’s Republican Party has defaulted in its roles of responsible fiscal and foreign policy and supporting our democracy. They favor instead isolation, which spawned two horrific wars and now clashes with global economic, technological, climate and migration challenges inherent in advancing and preserving civilization on our planet.

Trump’s Republican Party writes only one check: paid to the order of chaos, isolationism and autocratic dictators, while abandoning allies and retreating to policies ignoring causes of migration and climate change. It leaves zero balance.

MEL McKINNEY

Little River

Court’s bad faith

EDITOR: The bad-faith decisions of the Supreme Court, beginning with Roe v. Wade and the latest, waiting 15 days to announce it will hear arguments the week of April 22 on the issue of immunity for a president in or out of office, leaves one with no hope for the rule of law. The court is as lacking in ethics as the former president. This latest delay means if the former president wins in November, his violations of law resulting in 91 charges will be null and void. He will be able to kill someone on Main Street without being held accountable. The three justices appointed by the former president, along with Clarence Thomas, have proven they are acting in bad faith, contrary to their sworn allegiance to the rule of law. The only means of maintaining the rule of law now is to vote for Joe Biden in November.

BERNARD LEFSON

Santa Rosa

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