LETTERS: Corruption is a concern, No book bans in high school

Corruption is a concern

After reading that a former Weslaco city commissioner was sentenced to more than 2 years for bribery, we can confirm that corruption is everywhere. The former commissioner was bribed to benefit legally some companies from 2005 to 2015, getting arrested with his partners.

Governments and even citizens should be more careful about the people they put in charge. They should put more barriers to people who want to oversee something of the community.

Throughout history, a lot of corrupt people have overseen important powers. Having a lot of levers and keys makes it easy for them to do things that benefit them and go against the law. According to Caily Griffin and Amy Mackinnon, “In the annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), the United States fell to a low of 67 out of a maximum possible score of 100, down from a high of 76 in 2015.” Several articles like this agree that this is the worst administration in a decade when we talk about corruption.

This situation concerns Americans about their people in power and their credibility. This needs to change. When the government loses the support of the citizens, it collapses. To avoid this, they need to provide people in whom they can put their trust.

At the other side of the sea, Denmark is least corrupt country, scoring 90 in 2022 according to Transparency International. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said some of the strategies this country uses to prevent bribery are “Proactively detect, investigate and prosecute foreign briber, clarify the legal basis for the small facilitation payment exception to the foreign bribery offence, adopt a clear and transparent framework for non-trial resolutions, etc.”

A lot of times we need to look at the outside to learn and improve our inside. Our government needs to improve our reinforcements and protect our citizens’ benefits, necessities and rights.

I hope this inconvenience becomes extinct for the health of this country.

Mayte Cedillo

McAllen

No book bans in high school

From just a quick search online you could find that Texas leads the nation in book bans. The movement may have a good motivation at heart, but book banning comes with dire repercussions.

I’m a junior in high school, and I’ll admit that I’m not the biggest bookworm. However, I fell in love with a few titles, and I found out they were all under threat of being removed.

Universally loved classics such as the Great Gatsby, East of Eden and the Catcher in the Rye provide amazing and profound themes that offer a lot to young readers. The main argument against these books is that they contain aspects considered too mature for high schoolers, but most of the time they are only being read by upperclassmen growing into adults.

It’s wrong to keep these books off the shelves solely for the purpose of sheltering already mature readers. Besides that, parents shouldn’t be so protective over these things, because the students reading these books are only months away from becoming free adults entering the outside world.

These bans aren’t necessary and are only hindering students from thinking for themselves. Arguments could be made for bans in grade school and maybe middle school, but in my opinion, there should never be any in high schools.

Dominic Policarpio

Mission

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