Letters on Black Lives Matter, climate science, cost of shutdown

Movement about racial inequality

I am white. Some people are taking offense at the Black Lives Matter movement. They claim the movement is saying that only black lives matter. They are wrong.

The movement thinks all lives matter, but it is pointing out racial inequality in our justice system.

It has been proved that the justice system treats races differently. When a white person and a black person commit the same nonviolent crime, the white person is more likely to receive probation rather than prison time while the black person more likely will receive prison time. If it is a violent crime, the white person will likely receive less prison time than the black person.

But it isn’t just the courts that are treating people of color differently; some police officers do as well. The majority of police officers are trying to do their jobs fairly and honestly. It is an extremely difficult job to do. But some of them do not do their jobs fairly and honestly. Black Lives Matter is trying to bring these practices out into the open so that the public knows what is going on, and so that these officers will be held accountable for their actions.

Willful ignorance

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has said: “If you look at satellite data for the last 18 years, there’s been zero recorded warming.... They’re cooking the books, they’re actually adjusting the numbers.” His statement is extreme in imputing gross cheating to climate scientists (except, presumably, the one from whom he gets his data). Other Republican candidates have offered similar positions, without insinuating malfeasance but denying, or being agnostic on, human causation.

This willful ignorance of climate science and disregard of valid sources is shameful, and betrays a narrowness in their general reading and information intake. We have to hope it doesn’t reflect their understanding of where the public is on this, or that they are taken as authoritative.

NASA’s Earth Observatory website has a features page, with a further authoritative global warming page. That and the website Realclimate.org are places that neither Cruz nor his competitors have visited, evidently. These sites are not just for denying politicians or climate wonks, though; they are for everyone, with answers for all the frequently asked questions.

Cost of shutdown

The article “Shuttering the government costs more than keeping it open” (Sept. 25 Eagle) left out a critical result of shutting down the government. In 2013, President Obama was scheduled to attend a Southeast Asia conference but ended up canceling because of the shutdown. This caused a great deal of ill will with the Southeast Asian countries. This may have been an unintended consequence of the shutdown. However, our legislators must think beyond the walls of Congress when they make such sweeping decisions.

This story was originally published September 29, 2015 at 7:04 PM with the headline "Letters on Black Lives Matter, climate science, cost of shutdown."