As a longtime resident of San Diego, and an aide to people trying to unhitch themselves from the very tight clutches of addiction, I know people can change. Every person has worth and some of the most remarkable people I know have made the biggest mistakes.
Yet somehow we’ve lost our humanity when we listen to demagogues promote the de-structive and inhumane philosophy of intolerance. “No tolerance laws” put us all in jeopardy, in this generation and the next. And when those same politicians fall into their own traps, the laws they promote don’t apply to them.
We have come to a place where it is okay to lock up our own youth (average age for delinquency is 19 years) with unforgiving sentences such a life without the possibility of parole. As a society, we know how pervasive mental health issues are, and I wonder if our culture of apathy contributes to that.
Nevertheless, we don’t intervene, we just throw people away. The sentence of “life without” implies incorrigibility, which completely contradicts human history, biblical morality, and all of the social sciences. This is probably why we are the only country in the Western hemisphere who does this to our own citizens, and our own children.
I urge you, my fellow members of the community, to reject such rhetoric. We have increasingly applied these heartless sentences for 30-plus years and they haven’t made us safer, or even feel safer. We just lock up hordes of redeem¬able people who do eventually change, but have absolutely no way out. Unconscionable! None of us can live up to any “no tolerance” standard, particularity our youth.
Mercedes Gomez
Santee
Cultivating support
I was happy to read supportive comments made by Iceland’s prime minister about cultivated meat. For those who aren’t familiar with the term, cultivated meat is grown from livestock cells, without slaughter. It has the potential to dramatically reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions, pandemic risk and the suffering we inflict on animals.
“Cultivated meat is one of the solutions to the climate challenge,” Katrín Jakobsdóttir said. “The Icelandic authorities are determined to pave the way for the adoption of new solutions in Iceland and we are eager to see the development of [a European Union] regulatory framework for cultivated meat.”
Instead of attempting to ban this new protein, as some American politicians have, our leaders should help advance the technology behind it. For instance, cultivated meat is currently too expen¬sive to mass produce. This can rectified with increased public funding for cultivated-meat research, which legislators should support.
Jon Hochschartner
Granby, Connecticut
