Letters to the Editor

Intolerable

To Councilmember Stacy Mungo: When “homelessness” is addressed in your community email update, are we talking about the camps and trash we see on sidewalks and empty lots in the city or is there some invisible demographic no one knows about? If we are, there is no nuanced or miraculous solution that just hasn’t been discovered.

In short, it’s tolerance that perpetuates it. I encourage anyone to approach any of these individuals or groups and ask them if they need transportation to a rescue mission or homeless facility. They will refuse and most are abusing drugs and alcohol.

So now what? I have heard this same old tired statement “we are working on it” for a couple of decades and beyond selective words, nothing changes. It’s getting old and to claim that somehow Long Beach is not quite as bad as other areas seems defeatist from the start and is not a solution.

How do you think communities like Seal Beach succeed in not subjecting their residents to this outrageous quality of life situation? I’ll tell you how. They don’t tolerate it! They make them move along immediately, not camp on the sidewalks or take over the back of a building for weeks. Show some backbone. Represent your district and people who elected you.

Robert Van der Upwich

The Real Bigots

Racist, Sexist, Bigot, Homophobe, Nazi, Klansman: Raise your hand if you have been denounced by the “Politically Correct Thought Gestapo” (PCTG) as one or more of these hateful labels because you disagreed with their Leftist point of view. What is happening to the precious freedoms that our magnificent country once offered?

Liberal Democrats have always had a very difficult time with our Bill of Rights. They want to eliminate the 2nd Amendment completely and rewrite the 1st Amendment so that freedom of speech and freedom of association apply only to them. All others are denounced by the PCTG and be required to prostrate themselves before the world and apologize for daring to disagree. You must change your opinion and march in unison with the Left or face destruction by the PCTG!

The real enemies of freedom are the intolerant Liberal Democrats who demand allegiance to the PCTG or you will suffer the consequences. We see daily one person after another being denounced as a racist or slimed by some other form of character assassination for something they said as a teenager, a Halloween costume they once wore or because they had the impertinence to disagree with the PCTG dogma.

Read your history and you will be terrified by the intolerance and riots that we are witnessing today and the similar events in Germany during the 1930s. The press calls the recent riots “demonstrations”; I call them frightening anarchists who attack our liberties as we watch our cities being taken over, set afire and looted.

Our country is being hijacked by the PCTG and their urban foot-solders, ANTIFA. Freedom isn’t free; those patriots buried in Arlington National Cemetery have paid the full price and we must honor them. Wake up America and vote.

Craig Miller

White Privilege

I would like to tell my side of the story for this white privilege so many talk about. I’m a white male who will turn 72 on May 14. My mother was a white female of German heritage who grew up in South Dakota during the Great Depression and who worked on the farm and as a house maid for a doctor’s family. This was also during the dust bowl years in farming.

She moved to California during the war and got a job as a “Rosie the Riveter” at Douglas Aircraft company and lived with her younger sister who also worked there. My mother met my father, also of German descent, at Douglas where he was an aeronautical engineer who moved here from Mena, Ark. after helping his father raise his brother and sisters when at the age of twelve his mother and one sister had died.

My mother was a home mom until my sister and I were in our late teens. My brother was 9 years older than I and had worked to buy himself two cars while living at home and going to college before obtaining a football scholarship – having been on the same LBCC football team as Dee Andrews and others who won the Junior Rose Bowl.

I started selling newspapers door to door in my teens or earlier. I bought my own bike for delivering papers when I got old enough to have a bike route and delivered papers before 6 a.m. every day for years to earn money. I had worked at two different Taco Bell’s and at the Broadway in Los Altos as a busboy in the restaurant while going to CSF where I obtained a BA after getting an AA at LBCC – also working in the theater there and after graduating from Millikan High School in 1967. I worked at some of these jobs at the same time while going to college.

My mother had gotten her job selling shoes at the Broadway after using my name as a reference. She was the top seller in the Western States for a number of years there.

I went to USC for post graduate work with my CSF BA and teaching credential and paid for the first year with my own money and then got a scholarship with instructor John Russel Taylor in the Film Arts Department before leaving to become a studio carpenter and made that my career for some 30 years.

I had to retire after two knee operations on each knee, one back operation, three hand surgeries and two hernia operations. Social Security doctors only took one observation to mark me as disabled. They had jokingly called me scar man at work in reference to the movie Star Man.

During my life I married my beloved wife and we have one son and one daughter. We live in a nice neighborhood and I drive my 2003 Dodge truck and my wife still works for the LBUSD and drives a 2017 Highlander. We’ve done rather well and worked hard for what we have gathered from our lives in terms of goods such as home and things. I don’t feel privileged, but I do feel proud yet humble that my life has thus far been full and definitely worth living.

I’ve known many people as a student in several different schools and colleges and not had any problems. I’ve worked with many people as a carpenter and had no problems except with a couple of bosses I worked for that I could have done without as I’m sure any working person can attest to.

If this is white privilege, then I guess I’m guilty as charged by so many on the left who want that stigma to stick to myself and so many others so very much like me. I just don’t see it.

I was harassed as a young man by some police and other adults and, of course, people of my own age. I’ve been judged by some and liked by others. Most people call that life and living. All the different people I’ve worked with in the studios are the full spectrum of colors, sexes, religions and what have you. There were never any problems except to make sure we all worked together for the betterment of whatever we were working on. That’s all that mattered – not color, sex, beliefs or anything else.

I wonder how many of the elitists following or pushing this white privilege agenda have ever even had a real job. I wonder why their goal seems to be to turn a great group of wonderful people into haters of their own nation and each other. I wonder how so many are falling for this hype and why they don’t all just get a job and work for a living to better themselves and those around them. Yeah, and smile once in a while.

Vance Frederick