Letters to the Editor

Downing Passing

I wanted to thank you for your article on our neighbor, Stephen Downing. I live on La Verne Ave too and truly enjoyed passing by the Downing home. You could say, I looked forward to it. Mr. Downing and his lovely family were always so kind and inviting. Stephen and his sweet wife Adrienne are such gracious neighbors.

Never was there a time when they did not greet you with a kind word, a shining smile or lots of laughter. They always welcomed all the passersby. I am grateful to have met them and talked a bit, although I never quite sat with them on their porch.

Last week I passed their home only to silence, but I did not think such a vivacious person could be gone. Stephen Downing will definitely be missed, and he will remain in our hearts forever. I am very sad but honored to have met this incredible man. RIP

Chela Marin

I am saddened by the news of the death of Stephen Downing, a true asset to the staff of the Beachcomber. Even though I am only an annual visitor to Long Beach with my wife for whom this is her hometown, and even though I have never had the honor of meeting Mr. Downing I know that I’ll miss his great, inciteful and honest reporting in the Beachcomber.

My condolences go to his family, and my thanks that they have allowed many of us to share Stephen with them by way of his opinions in the media.

Peter Somssich
Portsmouth NH

Lipstick On a Pig

I just received a text poll to see my opinion on a tax that Long Beach is thinking about floating on the next election. Very flowery using Trump-cutting funding as the reason, and using all the buzz words: “help for the homeless, increase police and fire, cut response times, fix roads.”

The Hit: 15 cents per square foot of residential land and 40 cents for commercial. The average lot size in Long Beach is 5,600 sq. ft. so that would be an additional $840 a year on your property taxes for something they should be doing already with existing city funds.

Be ready folks, they are going to wrap this with a pretty bow and sell the heck out of it. Just remember, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig!

Marc Cobb
via Nextdoor

Merry? Christmas

Oh no, Tannenbaum: despite my name, I am not feeling very merry at this time of year.

Every year, as part of our annual commodification of wonder, 35 million trees are cut down to provide us with the competitive status of having the tallest and most decorated Christmas tree in all the land. This includes the “tree farms” that grow crops of trees to be harvested in time for us to tie our expensive but perfect dead tree on top of our car for the funeral procession home.

Once home, it is decorated beyond recognition with electric lights, fussed over, bragged about, and compared to others in the ongoing competition for the “best” tree – all while we hope the needles of our dead tree won’t turn too conspicuously brown and fall off before Christmas, despite the chemicals with which it has been sprayed to delay the natural process of decomposition and keep it a life-like green as long as possible.

After Christmas, the tree is unceremoniously stripped of its finery and dragged to the curb to await the trash truck that will take it to its final resting place, the recycling center. There it will be ground into mulch to enhance the performative faux environmentalism of “desert landscaping” which, ironically, seems more symbolic of Christmas considering that Jesus was born in a desert, a landscape not known for its evergreen trees.

Would these trees not have served better if allowed to remain in their natural environment, fulfilling their environmental legacy as oxygen providers, natural air filters, flood protection, and home to a variety of animals and the shrinking population of birds – not to mention protection against the worsening of the extreme weather conditions we are already experiencing due to lack of trees.

And couldn’t “tree farms” grow trees to restore our depleted forests rather than growing trees to be killed and then decorated to fulfill our quest for the gaudy, consumptive need to compete?

That’s not merry, it’s ho-ho-horrible.

Merry Colvin