“Common-sense conservatives,” Jack Ayoub says, always remember the “eternal truth,” that “good” people do good things with what they have, “bad” people do bad things with what they have, and “bleeding-heart liberals” have long ago forgotten this. I have no idea what Mr. Ayoub is implying here, but if he keeps on saying it, he must think it’s true (Letters, July 10).
Ayoub says that good people will do good things with rifles, planes, knives and bats, and bad people will do bad things with these same “tools” and all the laws, regulations, rules and gun-free zone signs will never change this eternal truth. Maybe so, but is it “common sense” for conservatives to try to deny a 10-year-old girl impregnated by a rapist to get a safe abortion?
When Mr. Ayoub refers to “bleeding-heart liberals,” is he saying these people are fools who are too sentimental in dealing with social and economic problems, or is he saying they are broad-minded folks who favor reform and progress when dealing with these issues?
A rifle is a rifle. A plane is a plane. A knife is a knife. A baseball bat is a baseball bat, and may I add, words are words.
Italo J. Zarate
Brownsville
Cowardice
and deceit
What lurks behind the face of cowardice and deceit? What inspires the self-denial and the repudiation of common sense and common knowledge?
Questions abound. Answers languish in incoherent and jumbled hyperbole of arrogance and contemptuousness, while America burns, and a dream dissolves into ashes, scattered by the wind over the rising flames of anarchy and madness.
The rise of cowardice and betrayal began with the prophetic descent down an escalator in a New York tower, and ended in the degeneration and depreciation of America’s nobility and stability, by a man, and a movement, that obscured and confused their allegiance to a nation, with allegiance to power, supremacy and dominance.
The eloquence of the presidency was replaced by the audacity of incompetence, pomposity and narcissism. Centuries of carefully molded and sculpted pillars of democracy, carefully and systematically razed from their foundation, and burned on a pyre of lies, deceit and a fabricated reality of a conspiratorial deep state, where everyone and everything is presumed an enemy of the state, until they prove their cowardice, timidity and corruptibility, through the abandonment of courage, and the embracement of un-American ideals and ideas.
And so, the face of cowardice has replaced the face of liberty, justice and equality. And behind the face of cowardice, the master of deceit and betrayal. The man who would be king. The man who leaves no one standing before him, or behind him. He is unto himself, the center of all that is, that should be, and all that he alone, will let be.
And 74,222,958 Americans believed him and trusted him. And it is frightening to believe that we have descended so far down the elevator with this man, and now cannot find our way back up to a place of courage, stability, credibility and reliability. Our world has been turned upside down. Un-Americanism is the new normal. Cowardice is the new measure of a man. And feigning blindness and deafness, the new way to avoid seeing and hearing the fading spirit of our American Dream.
Al Garcia
San Juan
