Letters for October 27, 2011

Delay led to cannabis crackdown

Re “Talk about the compassion” by Nick Miller (SN&R The 420, October 20):

I think the state of California and the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors should be embarrassed by the way they have handled the whole cannabis issue.

Both had 15 years to come up with a way to avoid the problem that has happened now, but they ignored every indicator telling them that this industry needed to be regulated. The result? We have a situation were everyone is going to be affected.

The county has been holding stakeholder meetings for the past few months … that I think were meant to stall the whole process of allowing collectives to operate in the county. I think the county knew that the feds were coming, and basically wasted everybody’s time and money, with no intent of following through with anything that they said.

I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. This industry needs to be regulated—which I am for—but not in the manner or direction that this has gone. California and Sacramento County should have had a sit-down with the right people and groups and taken care of this a long time ago.

I do know one thing that the feds, the state of California, and Sacramento County can’t change: Cannabis is and cannabis always will be medicine.

Mark Lusk
Sacramento

America needs FDR

Re “A generation awakens” by Jay Feldman (SN&R Essay, October 20):

The problem is really one of the loss of the manufacturing base of the U.S., which leads to lack of real jobs and the failure of money as a substitute for meaning.

Consider [President] Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first inaugural address: “Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.”

This is what’s missing in our country and why people are pissed off.

Again, FDR: “Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources.”

Jobs! Equality! Accountability!

Gonzalo I. Vergara
Sacramento

Hint: He’s not the problem

Re “Body by love” by Joey Garcia (SN&R Ask Joey, October 20):

I want to address the person that wrote in regarding her husband not taking off his shirt when making love, how it bothered her and how she could get him to overcome it. In Joey’s reply, she stated: “Body shame is a form of self-rejection that blooms from the seed of self-hate.”

Bullsticks! That is as much crap as you get from a field full of cows!

That seed is from other people forcing their views of what “attractive” is down your throat day after day. It is not self-hate, it is learned hate from others. You are being told to hate something about your self. “Self-hate,” no matter how you look at it, is learned only once you have been told there is something “bad/ugly” about you. It is learned behavior that we have to be exposed to, and that is an important thing to point out!

I ask you, how many people have to die before we people as a whole learn to stop projecting our fears and shortcomings on to others? After all these thousands of years we still cannot do this?

This woman’s husband is not any different than myself. I am over 300 pounds, and most of it is in my stomach. I love myself the way I am, and I have no seeds of self-hate. All that hate came from the other people treating me like shit for being fat! That is the issue. That is his issue. If he was not treated like crap for it, then he saw other people getting treated like shit for it. It is forced on us, and it is not something that is up to the person that is feeling it to work on. It is for the rest of society to deal with as a whole!

I studied psychology, and although there is merit to what you said in your reply, there is still the plain and simple fact that if it was not for someone else saying you were fat or ugly, then you would not know! We as adults teach our children all that they learn and that is exactly what we have taught them in the U.S.—and to be honest most of the world: to hate that what is not “socially accepted by others” or not understood.

My advice to that person that wrote to you is to tell her to leave her husband alone about the freaking shirt. So what you like skin-on-skin contact? Freaking think of his feelings. He is hurt! He is in pain! Seriously, if all that matters is that you want to have a full skin-on-skin contact during sex and not his pain, then I think he would be better off single. The world is telling him all the time he is ugly/fat/whatever you like. That is what you should be mad at and that is what you should be fighting.

The only way for that person’s husband to ever feel better is: 1. he would need to learn to not let it bother him (and that answer sucks), or 2. the problem itself—people hurting others—needs to end. I vote for No. 2.

Ithryn Luin
Sacramento

No bodies, but remains

Re “Magdalena’s journey” by Mary Duan and Kera Abraham (SN&R Feature, October 13):

I just went over “Magdalena’s journey” with interest, and while it’s a great concept and all, there were a couple of glaring inaccuracies in the story, the most obvious regarding this sentence: “Then they headed for a nearby Buddhist temple, where the tsunami had washed over the adjacent cemetery, toppled gravestones and carried bodies away.”

It’s illegal in Japan to bury bodies—everyone gets cremated—especially for Buddhist cemeteries; therefore, there would be no bodies washed away for the simple reason that there are no bodies in the cemeteries here.

So, great effort and concept, but a little irritating to read for a 27-year resident of Japan who wishes an aspiring journalist would do a little more homework when publishing something serious like this.

Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
Tokyo, Japan

Author’s reply: The only difference between a body or ashes being swept from a grave is physical remains versus dissolved remains. To me, the visual effect of the toppled graves was in a way a microcosm of the greater scene at hand: a community swept up and left empty. I apologize if there was any resentment towards the article due to this bit of miscommunicated information.

Bankruptcy doesn’t clear student loans

Re “The college bubble” by Nick Miller (SN&R Feature, October 6):

Don’t want to burst your bubble, but the U.S. Department of Education would not let my husband bankrupt on a specific loan in the 1980s and that they have been taking our tax refunds since then, too.

Jo Ann Jackson-Holt
Fair Oaks