Don’t let fear keep you away
Regarding “Why Millennials feel apathy for voting” (Letters, Nov. 4): Yes, I agree what you say. Yes, my generation (senior) may have screwed up, but you are the ones who can get it straight by voting, voting, voting. Then, run for office where you can make a change.
If you do not vote now, you may not be able to vote in 2020. Not the way things are going now with voter suppression, racism, and the women’s rights and LGBT rights that the Republicans are trying to take away from us.
The divisions and lies are being told over and over again. In my 68 years of voting, I have never seen anything as nasty, cruel and inhuman as what the GOP and the person in the White House are spouting, let alone the inhumanity they are espousing. That includes fear that a caravan 1,000 miles away is full of invaders and trying to say babies born in this country are not citizens.
Sorry to say, this administration is acting more and more like Nazis and Stalinists. So vote, vote, vote to get these people out office. Get our America back to be as good as it can be.
Joanna DeZutti, Redwood City
Hope for ‘blue wave’
Concerning “It’s time to stand up for right to say ‘we’ ” (Nov. 5): Although columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. believes that Americans are poised to deliver a message that rejects President Trump’s divisive political demagoguery this election day, I feel less confident for three reasons: First, those who vote with their wallets and pocketbooks will — even with stagnant wages — credit Trump and the GOP for the low unemployment rate. Second, too many voters are, like the president, uninformed about the basics of government and have been easily manipulated by false campaign ads. Third, there is a likelihood that computer hacking will prevent an accurate count of all ballots being cast. I hope I’m at least proved wrong about the last reason and that an anticipated blue wave of Democratic victories isn’t merely a trickle.
Terrence Williams, Berkeley
No excuses not to vote
“Why Millennials feel apathy for voting” (Letters, Nov. 4) perfectly confirms the unhappy state in which our country finds itself, viz, that many citizens prefer the easy task of complaining to the difficult task of voting. Embracing the rubric of Millennial does not grant a citizen the luxury of disengaging from the obligation of helping our nation restore decency, morality and full democracy.
While the author’s list of egregious failures of our government to govern with care to protect its citizens is illustrative of our collective pain, our government’s many failures do not excuse any citizen from the exceedingly difficult work of understanding the issues that face our nation and the exhausting work of righting those conditions. To claim the cloak of apathy is to refuse to accept that the true condition is either cowardice or immaturity. Henry Navas, San Francisco
State’s DMV debacle
So according to “No-confidence vote for DMV” (Editorial, Nov. 5), our state’s Department of Motor Vehicles’ Motor Voter program produced “1,500 mistaken registrations, including some who were not eligible to vote because they were noncitizens, younger than 18 or on parole”?
Well, on the plus side, the DMV apparently didn’t register anyone who was deceased, and none of those who were mistakenly registered was subjected an interminably long DMV wait time. Eileen Fitzgerald, Pacifica
Principles of democracy
Although I agree with the writer of “Parent’s responsibility to teach values” (Letters, Nov. 3), it is not enough to have a civics class in our high schools and rely solely on parents. We need to teach our students every school year, starting in the early grades, the basic principles of a democracy: the importance of a free press, voting in each election, the Constitution, checks and balances, a government by the people and for the people and a government based on laws.
Our young people need more than being told to salute the flag each morning. Having a family dinner each night often won’t do the trick when some parents have been raised in an environment that produces ill-informed citizens. Sharon Zinke, Oakland
Worker drones
So Amazon wants to teach 10 million students a year how to code (Daily Briefing, Business, Nov. 4)? By creating so many potential worker drones beginning at a young age, perhaps Amazon’s CEO will soon be known as Jeff (King or Queen) “Bee-zos.”
Gregory Smithson, San Carlos