Editor,
People who live in bubbles should not be giving advice on how to change the world. A case in point is Colleen Tyler’s response to Sabrina Jennings’ letter regarding racism.
Colleen wrote that 50 years ago we knew that America stood for freedom and equality and respect for each other’s diversity. Wow. Was she really talking about America in 1970?
In 1970, the war in Vietnam was raging – a war of colonization that we took over from the French colonists and in which we tried to force the Vietnamese to live under our corrupt dictators.
In 1970, the My Lai massacre showed how our American “values” can be so easily bastardized.
In 1970, college kids were being shot dead on a college campus for protesting our secret invasion of Cambodia.
In 1970, Jim Crow was alive and well in the South and redlining was the normal realtor activity in the North just two years after Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated.
I don’t see how such a systemic system like racism can be challenged when we don’t admit our past failings.
And…Colleen – please don’t use a TV commercial by a conglomerate that sells sugar water to imagine a world of peace and splendor. That may make sense to you in your bubble – but it doesn’t play well out here in the real world.
MARK TATRO
