Boom! Georgia goes backwards
Whoopee! Fireworks in Georgia. Can gigantic tin shacks at the state line be far behind? Look what Dixiecrat-Republican rule has wrought since 2003: Brontosaurus-sized billboards littering the landscape. Lexus lanes excluding commoners. State money diverted to private schools. Regressive taxes and fees giving us higher-priced gas and hotel stays than neighboring states. While average taxpayers got fleeced, governors from Middle Georgia and Gainesville talked tough, then turned blind eyes to illegal immigration so peaches got picked and chickens got plucked. Ethics? One House speaker cashiered due to lobbyist “benefits.” Another escorted his family on a lobbyist-sponsored trip to Europe. Maybe worst of all, Florida Gators on Georgia tags. All in the name of filthy lucre.
JIM CONNAH, SANDY SPRINGS
South side woes reflect on all of us
Bill Torpy’s article on the danger and degradation of Atlanta’s south side (“Memo to Underground developer: Bring a flak jacket,” Metro, July 9) left me shocked. It was not the state of the downtown neighborhood Torpy described that put me into this stupor; it was the sheer callousness and myopic indignation.
Yes, Atlanta has its problems. But the prevailing notion about how to solve these problems — locking up more people — does nothing to reform the systematic pressures that created these issues. Torpy’s article appeared on the same page as stories about the dissolute Atlanta Public Schools, the KKK seeking state recognition for a project, and a Georgia state senator’s desire to restrict immigrants even more than they already are. Instead of ignoring the themes that tie all these things together, perhaps we could take action at the core of the wound. Drug use and drinking, vagrancy and loitering, are all symptomatic of a deeper illness, one that is ever more resistant to arrests and outstanding warrants. Not one of us is immune from this illness; indeed, all of us are pathogenic.
Writer misleads on Jefferson legacy
I must take issue with one statement AJC columnist Jay Bookman wrote in his column, “Sifting through our Confederate attic: What stays, what goes” (Opinion, July 7). Bookman wrote that Thomas Jefferson had “fathered children with a slave and held some of those children as slaves until his death.” This is misleading, in implication.
Jefferson had always wanted the institution of slavery to be purged from our nation. Jefferson had kept his promise to his young, dying wife never to marry again. He also kept his promise of 37 years to her half-sister, his slave mistress Sally Hemings, to free their children at age 21. Jefferson freed his last two sons, Thomas Eston Hemings and James Madison Hemings, at ages 18 and 21 in his probated will, along with their uncle John Hemings, to whom they had served as apprentices.
We must explore our Founding Fathers’ minds and choices with depth.
ELIZABETH HARTLEY FILLIAT, ALPHARETTA
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