- Not So Great
- From FDR To Trump
- The Rest Is Noise
- Even Meals On Wheels?
- Trump's Hundred Days
- Immigration Questions
NOT SO GREAT
Editor:
Donald Trump is planning to make America great by encouraging women to stay home and have more babies to create a larger workforce. He is going to eliminate Head Start, which serves 800,000 low-income children in the United States. Head Start helps with child care, medical screenings and nutritious food. Trump already started dismantling the Department of Education, which means babies, quite possibly, will grow up in a uneducated and low-paid workforce. This allows the United States to effectively compete with China? Who benefits from this? Low-paid people forced to work in factories, or people who own the factories? Of course, Trump needs to eliminate the immigrant workers who now provide much cheap labor.
So what do we end up with? Haves and have-nots, with maybe a few moderately paid occupations requiring special knowledge and training. Rich get richer, poor get poorer.
Make America great.
Mary Cay Sprague
Santa Rosa
FROM FDR TO TRUMP
To the Editor:
Re “The New Deal Is a Stinging Rebuke to Trump and Trumpism,” by Jamelle Bouie (NY Times, April 30, 2025)
In his first 100 days in office, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, my grandfather, encouraged us to believe in ourselves, to trust and help our neighbors, and to put the country’s stability and well-being as a whole at the forefront.
By contrast, the current administration has caused economic chaos at home and abroad, while exhibiting carelessness and cruelty to nearly everyone except billionaires. The early success of a presidential agenda should be defined by what it creates and not by what it destroys — the confidence in the American promise that it inspires, not the fear it sows.
All my life I have lived in the shadow — no, the glow — of the legacy of my grandparents’ leadership, ideals and public accomplishments. I am 77 years old, and I hope I live to see that legacy give rise to a reborn America that treasures the freedoms they enshrined: the freedom of speech and expression, the freedom to live one’s own faith, the freedom from desperation and want, and most especially, the freedom from fear.
Thank you, Mr. Bouie, for your clear declaration of what we must do and why.
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt
Embden, Maine
THE REST IS NOISE
Editor:
It’s time to stop all the narrative about the man deported wrongly to El Salvador. It doesn’t matter if he’s the father of the year or a serial killer. It’s not about him, it’s about us as a country. We either abide by our own laws or we don’t. It’s just that simple. We are supposed to be a nation of laws. If the government starts deciding which laws it will or won’t obey, then we are no longer anything close to what the founders intended. Kilmar Abrego Garcia needs to be brought back to finish the legal process. That’s all there is to it; the rest is all noise.
Stuart Campbell
Cotati
EVEN MEALS ON WHEELS?
To the Editor:
As a social worker and volunteer for Meals on Wheels, I am shocked and dismayed by the cutbacks planned at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the potential impact on the elderly and the disabled in our communities.
Meals on Wheels provides a lifeline for seniors confronting food insecurity. Moreover, it allows volunteers to check on the well-being of meal recipients and offers door-to-door human contact desperately needed by the homebound.
When we lose sight of the needs of our most vulnerable in the interest of government efficiency, our compassion is on the chopping block.
June Rogoznica
Rye, New York
TRUMP'S HUNDRED DAYS
Editor:
Is anybody worried yet? So far, the Trump administration has:
Crashed the stock market and destabilized international trade with capricious tariff policies.
Systematically dismantled the institutions upon which a functioning society depends by firing thousands of federal employees at the IRS, Social Security, Veteran’s Affairs, National Institutes of Health, National Weather Service, Federal Aviation Administration and more.
Defied court orders and the Constitution.
Started promoting the return of coal and oil drilling while ignoring measures to combat climate change.
Cozied up to dictators while restricting support for Ukraine and threatening to acquire Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal by force.
Defunded the U.S. Agency for International Development, resulting in increases in tuberculosis and AIDS in Africa.
Chosen advisers by only one criterion, loyalty (no dissent), resulting in a host of incompetent individuals in important roles.
Promoted a policy of revenge toward any person or institution perceived as ever having opposed Trump, including law firms, universities and news agencies, to the point of using federal funds as a blackmail tactic.
Revoked visas of students for exercising their First Amendment rights.
Failed to fulfill the promises of DOGE.
Made policy one day at a time.
Leland Davis
Santa Rosa
IMMIGRATION QUESTIONS
To the Editor:
While the results of the New York Times/Siena College poll suggest that support for President Trump’s immigration policies is waning somewhat, the article suggests that most Americans still support deportation.
Perhaps the polls should be asking a more nuanced set of questions that would force respondents to address the reality of undocumented workers and the consequences of mass deportation.
Here are some suggestions:
- If undocumented immigrants are deported, are you personally willing to:
- Do their job milking cows and shoveling manure on a dairy farm?
- Travel from farm to farm picking fruit all year?
- Process chicken in a substandard meatpacking plant?
- Handle toxic waste at a disaster site?
- Use a leaf blower all day in 100-degree temperatures?
- If the answer to any of these questions is no, who do you think should do that work?
- What should the government do to or for people who do these jobs to support your own lifestyle, health and well-being?
- Deport them.
- Provide a pathway to citizenship.
- Provide a legal pathway to permanent residency.
Leslie Turpin
Westminster West, Vermont
Perhaps you, Leslie Turpin, should be asking more “nuanced” questions about the Ponzi scam of open borders.
For starters, “undocumented” is your cynical euphemism for illegal aliens who often are “documented” — with stolen or forged documents.
Americans used to & still are capable of doing low-status strenuous manual labor. I’m a stale pale male who until recently moved furniture for a living (including pianos, hot tubs, etc., and yes, in hot weather & cold).
On one hand your kind demands importing endless millions of aliens to exploit for cheap labor — on the other hand you complain that they’re being exploited!
You then demand all kinds of privileges for illegal aliens…
— “right” to vote;
— automatic citizenship,;
— importing all their relatives who don’t/can’t work;
— accommodating their typically high birthrates;
— us having to learn their languages so they don’t have to learn ours;
— driver’s licenses;
— DEI-imposed guilt everywhere we turn;
— all kinds of welfare;
— excusing/trivializing their criminality;
— even free college educations!
Who the hell do you think you’re kidding? You’re demanding an unending chain of growth in a finite system — in fact, a monstrous Ponzi scam!
Meanwhile, we become ever more overcrowded, when American birthrates would be headed in the direction of sustainability without massively UNSUSTAINABLE immigration.
The domestic economic system can adjust to paying Americans whatever supply-&-demand requires for them to do unpleasant work. The cost of some things like food would go up, but the true cost of many other things would more than compensate — such as:
— reduction all kind of welfare, for aliens & for Americans;
— reduction in crime (yes, crime!);
— reduction of stress from becoming ever more crowded;
— & that includes less stress on the environment.
FYI, I personally get along with immigrants. I don’t hate them. I do hate the pursuit of endless growth, wherever it comes from.
Is that “nuanced” enough for you?