Plumbing 
View from abroad
I am not sure of the date, but about three years ago I retired and moved to Xalapa, Veracruz, México to be with my wife. I have been back to the United States only once, about a year and a half ago to visit my son Kevin in Eugene, Oregon and my sister Maria, a retired university professor in San Diego.
Living here is great in many ways. For one thing, dollars are worth a lot… 22.5 pesos to the dollar! Food is cheaper, both in supermarket and restaurant form. Rents are ridiculously low…. maybe $200 monthly for a small three-bedroom home. Utilities are low priced compared to U.S. costs, so we live well on my retirement income.
The other side of this is the politics… if you imagine a leftist Trump, that’s what we have, and just as crazy. I get a lot of English channels on SKY, our TV provider, from CNN to Fox, from HBO to slews of specialty channels.
This brings me to the crux of my experience living here… Americans living in the U.S. probably have no idea how dysfunctional they appear from a distance. As a pretty good lawyer, my perception is a class action mental commitment would help. God save you if you don’t replace Trump.
As my hero The Terminator would say: Hasta la Vista baby!
Pete Nieto
Xalapa, Veracruz, México
Racism not a hoax
Those who remain ignorant of history are doomed to repeat its folly.
American history is cyclical. The drama playing out today is not the parallel of the Russian Revolution or the rise of Nazi Germany. Tragically, it is the parallel of our own past many times over.
It is ignorance of this history that leads persons of good intention to repeat the same charges that have been leveled against every movement for racial progress in this country and to advance the same defense of the status quo, echoing, for instance, those who called the Civil Rights Movement a communist plot and an attempt to destroy the American way of life.
To this ignorance may be ascribed the ease with which such persons halt their search for truth at what confirms their own beliefs, and characterize their perceived enemies as a monolith defined by its worst elements.
The Jefferson Davis memorial on our town square is not a relic of the Civil War. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2019 article “Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy,” there was a spike in the erection of such monuments in the early 20th century. A second spike occurred at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Coincidence?
The first spike did not occur when it did because the South just happened to have finished rebuilding itself. Such monuments symbolized the reassertion of white supremacist power structures, and were accompanied by the resurgence of the KKK, the total exclusion of African Americans from Congress, Jim Crow legislation, extrajudicial killings, and widespread race riots.
This history has been erased. The Jefferson Davis memorial is itself a monument to that erasure, and the erasure of generations of Texans of color. Those who defend its presence owe it to the public to come to grips with this history.
Systemic racism is not a hoax. The oppression or exclusion of people of color did not end with the abolition of slavery. It remains our problem, bequeathed to us by our ancestors. We must resist counsels of fear and slippery-slope rhetoric to confront that fact and change it.
Opponents of removal have complained that no one ever cared about the monument until now. Perhaps some people did care, but were afraid to voice their dissent.
Michael Ortiz
Uvalde
Perfect recount
I received a call the other day from Uvalde County Republican Party chairman Jeff Santleben. He wanted to know if I was aware of the outcome of the Republican recount resulting in zero mistakes. This was something new for him, no mistakes. This was directly due to the accountability and reliability of Melissa Jones Bradham and her staff, and on this we both agree.
He then asked if I still wrote for a newspaper and was disappointed when I told him I had retired from that position. I promised him I would write this letter and so I have. The only thing I can add is that I am sure that Melissa’s grandfather, Woodrow Ede, formerly of Knippa, is very pleased with his granddaughter.
Billie Franklin
Sabinal
Perspective
Critical events are negatively impacting all of us with overwhelming speed. This situation cries out for valid historical perspective, and I’ve discovered such perspective in the book: “On Tyranny-Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” by Timothy Snyder.
Snyder is the Levin professor of history at Yale, and has been interviewed recently on MSNBC. We can see the threats and challenges – described in “Twenty Lessons” – uncannily repeated, expanded, and unfolding into August 2020.
The 20 lessons: “1. Do not obey in advance. 2. Defend institutions. 3. Beware the one-party state. 4. Take responsibility for the face of the world. 5. Remember professional ethics. 6. Be wary of paramilitaries. 7. Be reflective if you must be armed. 8. Stand out. 9. Be kind to our language. 10. Believe in truth. 11. Investigate. 12. Make eye contact and small talk. 13. Practice corporeal politics. 14. Established a private life. 15. Contribute to good causes. 16. Learn from other countries. 17. Listen for dangerous words. 18. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. 19. Be a patriot. 20. Be as courageous as you can.”
Excerpt from Lesson 10, Believe in truth: “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom…
“You may submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case…
“The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. The president does this at a higher rate and at a fast pace. One attempt during the 2016 campaign to track his utterances found that 78% of his factual claims were false…
“Second mode is shamanistical incantation. As Klemperer noted, the fascist style depends upon “endless repetition,” designed to make the fictional plausible and a criminal desirable. The systematic use of nicknames such as ‘Lying Ted’ and ‘Crooked Hillary’ displaced certain character traits that might more appropriately have been affixed to the president himself.
“At rallies, repeated chants of ‘build that wall’ and ‘lock her up’ did not describe anything that the president had specific plans to do, but their very grandiosity established a connection between him and his audience.
“The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. The president’s campaign involved the promises of cutting taxes for everyone, eliminating the national debt, and increasing spending on both social policy and national defense. These promises mutually contradict. …Accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of reason.
“The final mode is misplaced faith. It involves the sort of self-deifying claims the president made when he said that “I alone can solve it” or “I am your voice.” … What terrified Klemperer was the way that this transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant…”
Snyder’s historical perspective has stripped away any conclusion other than Donald Trump’s aberrant behavior continues to mirror that of a wannabe autocrat, and he must be voted out.
Pat V. Powers
Utopia
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