Letters for January 11, 2001

Winchester speaks with irony

Re “Political Prostitution” (RN&R Arts & Lifestyle, Dec. 7):

Jessi Winchester, a woman of many talents, complains that her treatment as a political candidate was unfair. As Jimmy Boegle writes, “She was completely shunned by the political parties because of her bordello past.” Winchester is quoted as saying, “This is not what the founding fathers had in mind.”

How right she is! Our founding fathers would not have allowed Ms. Winchester to VOTE, let alone run for office. And while some of the founding fathers may have appreciated her expertise in private, they would have driven her out of town had she gone public. Irony abounds right here in Reno.

Kate Hulbert Douglas City, Calif.

Open letter to Coffin & Keys

Re “Coffin & Keys” (RN&R, Dec. 14):

My open letter to you is made with the intent and purpose of beginning the process of destroying you. Read on, and you will find a political move to discontinue the heritage and tradition of dominance and oppression you represent.

I have sat and watched you throw a smokescreen to the community by propagating your “multiethnic membership” and “noble intentions.” I can’t help but laugh at your stupidity for illuminating how oppression and discrimination truly work within the borders of this country. You exist as a group only because you have been chosen as the benefactors of a narrow system that perpetuates power discrepancies along the historical categories of race, class and gender. Your privilege is so entrenched within your psyche and reinforced by the dominant order that when your membership is based upon “the quality of a student’s character,” you don’t even realize the possibility of how your ideas of “quality” and “character” might (gasp!) be based upon the same privileged vision.

Keep your masks, your anonymity and your foolish, faux-intellectual discourse. We know who you are. We have always known who you are. Your restricted, typical identity quickly and easily distinguishes you as the enemy of progress. You have done nothing for this community but protect the interest and traditions of your tiny, elite group. I urge you to disband to avoid future embarrassment from your hypocrisy.

As the revolution continues, you will be the first to go.

Carl Nicholas Beach Reno

Freedom is what’s endangered

Whatever happened to government of the people, by the people and for the people? Despite formal expressions of disapproval from 16 of Nevada’s county governments representing the people of Nevada, the federal commissars have designated with the Black Rock Bill over 1.5 million acres as “wilderness areas.”

This federal assault on the people of Nevada emphasizes the ugly reality that we are not self-governing people of a sovereign state, but a territory of the federal government.

Having surreptitiously deprived us, the sovereign citizens, of our property via excessive taxation and regulations, the federal government unabashedly and relentlessly continues its assault upon private property. The government propagandizes the unwary and uninformed with a continual barrage of unfounded and preposterous suppositions under color of science and in the name of spotted owls, wild horses, global cooling or warming, ozone, asbestos, ad infinitum, all of which assume that individual property owners are exploiters of the earth and enemies of the people and that the government is the beneficent protector. In reality, the productive, free American citizen has become the real “endangered species.”

Daniel Hansen Sparks

Crisis of tyranny

It is said that ignorance is bliss. Maybe it is, but not for me. Not when my country is going to hell, and not when it calls to us all for help. All I can say is, wake up, oh sleeping America, your country is ruled by tyrants who wish only to rule us all. Do you want the government looking over your shoulder, watching you all the time like they do today?

The disaster with the election should have woken you up a bit to the danger we are faced with. We are in a crisis, a struggle between the preservation of our republic and a government headed by a dictatorship of thousands of bureaucrats who seek nothing more than placing us under complete servitude to them. I ask you this, which would you choose: freedom or slavery? If freedom, then I ask that you read the document you hear talked about on the nightly news—the Constitution.

Nick Aguilera via e-mail