Letters

Dec. 12, 2010

Speak up for Liz Larios
The night after I read about Liz Larios in the Northern Express I woke
up and couldn’t get back to sleep. I could not get the vision out of
my head of this beautiful young woman who was pictured in the N.E.
with her fiance, being grabbed up in her own front yard, in her
pajamas, not being allowed to get dressed, dragged to multiple
detention centers before being dumped, still in her pajamas, across
the border.
Can this be happening in our country? Has it come to this? Liz came
here as a child; lived her life here; this is her home. Her crime? She
was born in Mexico. Her parents’ crime? They sought a better life some
18 years ago when crossing into the U.S. was what people did, trying
to escape hunger, poverty and few economic options. Wouldn’t I do the
same thing to try to provide for my family?
Those of us who don’t think this is an acceptable policy - to drag
away people who are working and living their lives - need to speak up.
Our democracy -- as broken as it is -- is all we have. We need to
contact those in power and demand that this gestapo-type behavior
stop. We must figure out a coherent, just immigration policy so that
the millions of people living in limbo can get on with their lives. In
the meantime, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency
(ICE) must be forced to stop its inhumane treatment of undocumented
people.
Recently, it was reported that Homeland Security Secretary Janet
Napolitano said her agency should spend its resources tracking down
“criminal aliens” — threats to public safety and national security.
“What doesn’t make as much sense is the idea of spending our
enforcement resources to prosecute young people who have no criminal
records, who were brought here through no fault of their own, so they
have no individual culpability, and who now want to go to college or
serve in our armed forces,” she said. The ICE agency is not in
compliance with these guidelines.
There is a local group forming to address this issue. If you want to
get involved, contact Father Wayne Dziekan at 231-409-1387 or
wdziekan@dioceseofgaylord.org.

Sally Van Vleck
Neahtawanta Center

Say yes to roundabouts
Traverse City has pondered & pondered, wondered & wondered -- said
yes, said no, gone on & on. About what? About roundabouts.
What’s a roundabout? A traffic circle, a rotary. You know those things
that are all over Europe -- and we Americans hate them. When do we get
on this spinning carousel? How and where do we get off? We have a
tendency to go round and round, as if on a merry-go-round. We
Americans hate roundabouts, rotaries, traffic circles. At this point,
The City of Traverse City is not about to build any roundabouts.
And yet the city of Carmel, Indiana built 60 of these things since
2001. Sixty roundabouts in nine years. Why did Carmel, Indiana, which
was one of the first cities in America to build traffic lights -- and
they are now in the process of tearing down many traffic lights in
Carmel, Indiana -- why did they build so many roundabouts?
“In revamped intersections there has been an 80% drop in crashes
involving injuries.“ Did you hear that? An 80% drop -- and those last
four words are very significant -- in crashes involving injuries. Not
fender benders, but those kind of crashes where somebody gets hurt.
Wow! Not 30% or 50%. This is much more significant: this is an 80%
drop in crashes involving injuries. Again, wow!
And here is the second statistic -- and all this is from an article in
Newsweek, October 11, written by Tom Vanderbuilt: “Roundabouts can
reduce fatal accidents by as much as 90%” And we thought an 80% drop
was significant. What about a 90% drop? “Reduce fatal accidents by as
much as 90%.”
I should stop repeating myself, yelling figures at you -- and Traverse
City should get on with it now. If not 60, we should build at least 40
roundabouts in the next 10 years.
My reasons are simple, I want to live in, I want friends and family to
visit, a city that has reduced car-related injuries by 80% and
car-related deaths by 90%.

Henry Morgenstein Southhampton, UK

Our endless wars
The NATO summit in Lisbon has concluded and the date has been set –
the Afghan war will be won and troops will come home in 2014 or 2015
or beyond, depending on the spin.
As wars go, Afghanistan is a particular conundrum; even before it
became an insurgency it was entangled in ethnic, religious and
regional discord. When the U.S. lifted the bothersome restraints of
the rule-of-law and accepted more expedient measures of torture,
extrajudicial executions, and extraordinary rendition, it ceded the
moral balance to the insurgents. This shucking-off of moral and
ethical restrictions served Al-Qaeda and the Taliban well in
recruiting men and women willing to die for their cause.
As I write, the George Washington Battle Group is off the North Korean
coast as a warning to Pyongyang in the latest game of chicken in the
60-year war across the 38th Parallel. When we did this in 1964 in the
Gulf of Tonkin, with the USS Maddox, we became entangled in Vietnam
and lost 60,000 Americans.
This brings us back to the Afghan war termination date. It is
inculcated in the psyche of American general officers that given
enough money, soldiers, and time, any war can be won. While the U.S.
is subsidizing the defense of Europe, Republic of Korea (ROK), Japan,
etc., those countries are investing in infrastructure, education,
science and technology. As we escalate the Afghan war, China – its
neighbor to the east – is out-producing the U.S. in cars and
supercomputers.
While investing in arms and building bases in the Republic of Korea –
28,000 U.S. troops at 16 bases – this country the size of Indiana
surpassed us in academic achievement. They now rank second in math,
seventh in science, and first in reading. The U.S. ranks 27th, 22nd
and 33rd respectively. If that were not painful enough, in the past
decade the ROK’s main financial index (KOSPI) gained 50% while the
main U.S. index (DJI) gained 1.5%.
When this “war on terror” started, my oldest son was seven. Today he
turns 17 and eligible to enlist in the military with his choice of
wars - his father’s (Iraq and Afghanistan) or his grandfather’s
(Korea).
We are fools for engaging in religious civil wars against an enemy
beyond western comprehension, where the only winners are weapons
dealers, Karzai, and his corrupt ministers. Regardless of the
termination date, it’s certain that the generals running the war today
will have retired. Rather than debating a termination date that is
predicated on victory, let’s accept the inevitable defeat and expedite
the conclusion.

Dave Lannen • TC
Dave Lannen is a member of Veterans for Peace who served in
Afghanistan and Iraq.