Thank you to the three people who have recently responded to my Letters to the Editor! I don’t always completely understand their responses, but perhaps they don’t completely understand what I am trying to say either. That is why civil conversation is so important.
Personal responses are not really appropriate here, so I will mention just two things:
1) Racism and religious extremism are not the same thing, but they can look very much alike and are both very scary; and
2) Near as I can discover, a republic is different from a democracy only in that it always involves representatives of the people rather than the people directly, so what we have is both democratic and a republic. The important thing is that we, the people, elect the folks who constitute the government.
And I don’t understand why many poor people choose to vote for rich representatives who can’t possibly know what their lives are like. That’s why I brought up Bernie Sanders, who is a regular guy who lives like most of us in this country and speaks a language we can all understand.
Thank you! Let’s keep talking!
Mary Fahnestock-Thomas
Hamilton