Letters for July 12, 2018

Kool-Aid abuse

Re “A threshold issue for everyone” (Left Foot Forward, June 21):

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry after reading the article by Sheila Leslie. I wanted to laugh because nobody with even the slightest bit of objectivity would have written something so blind and ignorant of the world and try to pass it off as unbiased journalism. But I find myself leaning toward crying because I have met enough people in my life to know there are “journalists” like Leslie but none of them would be crazy enough to put their thoughts in print.

She mentions Trump’s recent implementation of a “Zero Tolerance” policy started this year. If she means the continuation of the law Obama failed to change during his almost decade-long administration, then I will concede she just didn’t express herself adequately enough. But we know she didn’t do this for the sake of space considerations and it likely wasn’t edited out for the same reason. She wants the reader to believe our president, Donald Trump, woke up one day and wanted to separate illegal immigrant parents from their children. If Leslie had done the slightest bit of research on the matter should would have stumbled across the AP article that ran recently in the “Nation” section of the June 21 PBS newsletter entitled “Immigrant Children Allege Abuse at Virginia Detention Center.” In this article several illegal immigrants, who had been separated from their parents, filed complaints about guards beating them, leaving them handcuffed on concrete floors and subjected to verbal abuse. All of this being perpetrated under the kind, compassionate eye of Barack Obama.

I’m sure President Trump didn’t expect the backlash from the visual nightmare he endured the past month by allowing border agents to follow a law put into place long before he became president. However, I’m guessing he was trying to shine light on the fact that our immigration policy is broken and needs fixing, ASAP. Leslie should have applauded the president for not abusing these innocent victims as the previous administration had done. If allowing TV crews to capture little kids crying and held in a cage lights a fire under our Congress to finally fix this issue then he should be applauded, not misrepresented by hacks like Sheila Leslie.

The last point I’d like to make is about her absurd notion that “every Republican candidate in Nevada should be questioned every day about … damaging and destroying families.” Does she have any facts to back up this claim that separating kids from their parents while they are processed “damages and destroys families?” I’m guessing anyone that has been drinking the liberal Kool-Aid as long as Leslie clearly has been drinking it hasn’t done any research on that either. It would have made her open her mind, and the readers’, that maybe the fault here lies with the parents themselves. You would have to be the worst parent in the world to force your child to try to enter a country clearly trying to stem the flow of illegal immigration and with a policy that separates them from their children until they are properly vetted. But Leslie doesn’t want to shed light on that side of the story, so I will, if you have the guts to publish this letter.

Dan Mackenzie

Reno

Truth and lies up for grabs

For 25 years during the Cold War, the British Broadcasting Corporation aired a radio program called “Letters without Signatures” presented by a gentleman named Austin Harrison. It was a reading of letters penned by East German citizens from all walks of life that were smuggled across the wall in various ingenious ways. A quote from a letter written by a teenager said, “We’re being educated in lies. I can’t tell truth and lies apart anymore. The whole world is dishonest. Politics is just a lying contest. What’s the point of life?”

Sound familiar? We live in a world of corporate/governmental-sponsored lies that would make Hitler’s propagandist Joseph Goebbels proud and Niccolo Machiavelli blush. Luckily, we still have a relatively free press where the truth can be known. We must keep in mind a quote of Edward R. Murrow in regards to editorializing: “Bias is OK as long as you don’t try to hide it.” I believe this thought includes the fact that any words written by man will have at least some small amount of bias and can only represent the point of view of the author, even if it’s only in the subject matter chosen.

Although your editorial staff seems to lean a bit to the left, thank you, RN&R, for allowing free speech to be presented from so many points of view remaining basically uncensored.

John Bogle

Fernley