Ninety percent of the issues being raised by the Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter have existed for decades, and neither the state nor federal government has corrected them. Why? Because once elected, these officials work to get re-elected.
We need constant turnover among elected officials to ensure that we have legislatures with a demographic that reflects the population. To accomplish that, we need term limits. For Congress, it should be two terms for senators and five terms in the House. For the state, it should be two terms for governors and four terms for Assembly and Senate members.
This will also be good for career politicians: If they perform well at the city or county level, they can move up without running into a log-jam of representatives building up their retirement coffers.
Larry Fitzpatrick, Wappingers Falls
I was paying for a sandwich in the village when a man walked by and said in a loud voice, “Black lives matter? White lives matter, too.”
White lives have always mattered. Because the white population is the dominant race in our county, whites control the state and federal government, health care, education and wealth. According to the studies cited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more black people are hospitalized for and die from COVID-19 than whites. For most cancers, African Americans have the highest death rate and the shortest survival of any racial group. Black infants die at twice the rate of white infants in the U.S.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has criticized the way we fund schools based on wealth (property taxes), so affluent suburbs can spend more per student. According to sources cited in How to Be an Antiracist, the black poverty rate in 2017 was 20 percent — triple the white rate. The black unemployment rate has been twice the white rate for more than 50 years. The median net worth of white families is about 10 times that of black families. White households are expected this year to own 86 times more wealth than black households.
And police shootings? According to The Washington Post, unarmed blacks are twice as likely to be killed by police as a white unarmed person.
So what does “Black Lives Matter” mean? It means black lives should matter as much as white lives.
Elise LaRocco, Cold Spring
