Letters to the editor

Make late starts an option for those who can sleep in

Re: “Students will be on campus longer, not home sleeping” (Letter to the editor, Oct. 7):

Imagine your parents forcing you to wake up early, only to drop you off an hour or more before school starts and having to nap in the hallways.

As a student, this would not only leave you tired but irritated as well. We need students energized and clearheaded.

However, I doubt a later start to school will result in more sleep for students. I believe it will just encourage students to stay up and sleep in later.

Let’s have a late-start program available to families that don’t need to drop their kids off early. This will have the option available for students who will utilize this time for extra sleep and will ensure that they aren’t being dropped off before school starts.

Let’s spread the word to prevent our students from being left to sleep in the hallways.

— Benjamin Hellstrom,

Santa Clara

Outages underscore need to overhaul PG&E, PUC

PG&E has become the poster child for Murphy’s law. Shutting off power to more than 800,000 customers as a “preventive safety measure” is the latest in a string of preposterous debacles wrought by PG&E. They have no one to blame but themselves and, quite possibly, the Public Utilities Commission — the totally inept, governor-appointed “independent” commission charged with regulation and oversight of California’s utilities.

Given PG&E’s woeful and criminal history and the PUC’s corrupt complicity therewith, the public continues to get exactly what it deserves.

This latest charade underscores the pressing need to completely overhaul PG&E and reconstitute the PUC to address the chronic problems with the utility, its overly cozy relationship with the PUC and their abject failure to meet court-mandated safety standards.

If something drastic isn’t done to address this incompetence and corruption, what we’ve witnessed during the last couple of days will become our “new normal.”

— Nick Cochran, San Jose

Outage offers an epiphany on survival in climate crisis

I had an epiphany during the PG&E power outage. It happened at CVS. I’d gone

in for ice, but the freezer was bare. I started to panic. What would happen to my food?

The clerk calmed me down: They had ice — the manager was bringing it out.

Another customer was there for ice, too. We compared notes as we waited: where to buy ice tomorrow, where to buy double D batteries. The stoplights at White and Aborn roads were out, but not the ones at White and Tully roads.

The ice arrived. We took what we needed and waited in line to buy it. That’s when I had the epiphany. When the climate crisis comes, it will be awful. But something amazing might happen. Maybe together we’ll figure out where to buy ice. And double Ds. And which roads to avoid.

Maybe we’ll look to each other to survive.

— Marilyn Horn-Fahey,

San Jose

Railroad built by Chinese, and on expropriated land

Re: “Hanson: The members of previous generations look like giants” (Opinion section, Mercurynews.com, Oct. 11):

Once again Victor Davis Hanson chooses to selectively view history through rose-colored glasses. Our ancestors, he says, were “builders and pioneers” who could build a “transcontinental railroad in six years,” whereas our incompetent bureaucrats have spent a decade on high-speed rail without laying a single foot of track.

Unmentioned, of course, is that the transcontinental railroad was built on land expropriated from overpowered Native Americans, and that feeding the labor force decimated the bison herds on which they depended for their sustenance. And that labor force? Chinese who were excluded from citizenship in the U.S.

High-speed rail today must be built on land acquired from wealthy farmers and homeowners. Want to try expropriation by force? Want to use cheap immigrant labor? I don’t think so.

It’s easy to compare a mythical “golden age” with the realities of our present world. But it’s also intellectually dishonest. — Jeremy Bloom, Sunnyvale