Readers’ comments: April 18, 2025
United we stand
Dear editor:
I’ve seen too much venom in our citizens’ comments section of our beloved Courier.
We have differences, no doubt about it, but we need a path to work with each other for our common good.
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that,” Martin Luther King Jr.
Lawrence Castorena
Claremont
E-bikes make trails unsafe for hikers
Dear editor:
I’d like to share my experience with e-bikes and hiking. The Marshall Canyon Trail is a beautiful hiking trail in La Verne. A lovely stream flows by the trail through a magnificent oak woodland. Sometimes one will see wildlife or an unusual bird.
However, I rarely hike there because e-bikes are allowed. Boys race at high speeds, often in groups, through the curving trails, coming upon hikers with no notice. The hiker has to stay on high alert and be ready to jump off the narrow trail, sometimes into poison oak or an unstable incline. Then one gets a face full of dust kicked up by the speeding bikes. If one of those bikes were to strike a hiker, a child, or a dog, it could severely maim, or even kill them.
Most adults use their bikes responsibly, but some of the youngsters are too immature to do so, creating real danger and ruining what should be a peaceful nature experience. I would hate to see this happen to our Claremont trails, too.
Nancy Mintie
Claremont
Keep e-bikes out of the Wilderness Park
Dear editor:
Following the debate over e-bikes in the Wilderness Park, I find that no one has thus far referenced the health issue. We have a serious problem of diabetes in our country and also a major problem of obesity, which causes diabetes. Hikers and bicyclists in the Wilderness Park are doing something to reduce their own risk of diabetes and obesity. The Wilderness Park is helping us to solve a big health problem.
Of course, the disabled and elderly should be permitted to ride e-bikes in the park. But we really need to encourage people without disabilities to walk and jog off the fat of the land. An e-bike won’t improve the rider’s health.
There are plenty of streets on which to ride your e-bike. Keep the e-bikes out of the Wilderness Park.
Ivan Light
Claremont
Proud of Jewish heritage
Dear editor:
I came to Claremont in the late 1970s. My family lived on the edges of the local Jewish community, but I grew up proud of my heritage. As a child, I was once attacked in a local park, shoved into a low cinderblock planter while classmates shouted slurs about my being a Jew. In high school, I was again targeted, this time by pseudo neo-Nazis. I was only protected because a few older football players stepped in.
These incidents didn’t define my experience of Claremont. For years, I believed this town had matured, that it made space for difference, dialogue, and complexity. But reading Mick Rhodes’ recent column, I felt something shift.
The piece presents itself as a defense of free speech, but it functions more like a moral directive cloaked in editorial form. The use of a highly charged, legally defined term like “genocide” — applied without context, precision, or acknowledgment of October 7 or Hamas — undermines meaningful conversation. What’s happening in Gaza is undeniably horrific. But calling it genocide without reckoning with the facts erases the legal and moral weight of that word, and shuts down honest debate.
I understand concerns about speech being suppressed on college campuses. I share them. But if we care about dialogue, we must also challenge rhetorical tools that masquerade as openness while actually narrowing the bounds of acceptable thought.
The Courier once reflected the texture of our town — civic debates, small-town quirks, shared moments. There’s still a need for that kind of space. I hope the paper can return to fostering thoughtful, open, and truly inclusive civic conversation.
Jonathan Bendiner
Claremont
We are all to blame for global trade problems
Dear editor:
About 20 years ago, I fell into conversation with a man whose son played for the Sagehens football team while at one of their games. He told me had just come back from Las Vegas, where he had finalized the financing for his opening a furniture factory in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) after having closed one in Oregon.
He told me he had hired two Chinese computer programmers for a combined salary of $400 a month, and then went on to describe, in glowing terms, how, wherever one looked, coal fired power plants dotted the landscape, that he had never seen sunsets with the colors he saw in the PRC, and factory waste went into streams and rivers with little if any treatment.
On his last night there, he said that party officials (he didn’t use the “C” word, a no-no for American capitalists I have met) had treated him to a farewell dinner, where fish was served.
“Fish,” I responded, “I wonder where they caught them?”
The look that crossed over his face, as he realized that all he had praised just might possibly impact him negatively, was priceless.
This sentiment has been the prevailing one in the United States, as short-term considerations have been paramount in regard to business. It was best summarized by the late Jack Welch, former CEO of GE who described his perfect business environment as follows, “You’d have every plant you own on a barge to move with currencies and changes in the economy.” Or Milton Friedman, “The only responsibility of business is to increase profits.”|
From Nixon on, the nonsense of unlimited free trade and globalization has created a U.S. that has seen huge shifts in wealth, all upward, leaving large parts of the country open to the scourge of unemployment and drug use, and, during the Covid pandemic, unable to make the things we needed to combat it and then suffering from inflation as overseas supply lines were shut down.
Trump is right that we need to bring back essential manufacturing to the U.S., it never should have left, but he is lying when he blames others. This wound has been self inflicted, and the blame goes to us all — corporate CEOs, politicians and U.S. citizens, all focused on the short term. The U.S. is the architect of a global trading system that came back to haunt us — the creation of an economic rival in the PRC whose planning is strategic and long term and who avoids wars at all costs.
Ironic that a nominally communist country should have a more mature approach to capitalism than we do.
Michael Nola
Claremont
Trump in cahoots with Salvadoran president
Dear editor:
Trump’s refusal to secure the return of a wrongly deported Salvadoran immigrant amounts to the first Constitutional crisis of his current term.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant and father to three special needs children, was wrongly deported by the Trump administration last month to an infamously inhumane Salvadoran prison. This happened despite a 2019 immigration court order that Abrego Garcia could not be deported back to El Salvador due to the gang violence he would face upon his return.
Abrego Garcia’s lawyers went to the U.S. Supreme Court to seek his return. While stopping short of a direct order, the Supreme Court last week instructed the Trump administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return. But Trump, in cahoots with Salvadoran dictatorial president, Nayib Bukele, has jointly refused to return him.
In an Oval Office joint news conference on Monday, a smiling Bukele said he couldn’t possibly smuggle a terrorist into the United States. Trump claims baselessly that his administration is powerless to secure his return.
Which is more shocking: Trump working in cahoots with a dictator to unlawfully jail a U.S. immigrant? Or Trump upping the ante in a hot-mic conversation with Bukele telling him that the next step is deportation of “homegrowns,” i.e., American citizens, to Bukele’s Central American gulag?
Given the Trump administration’s refusal to follow the Supreme Court’s direction to return Abrego Garcia to the United States, what’s to prevent the administration from ordering the arrest and deportation of U.S. citizens protesting his actions in any city, including Claremont?
Our president has abandoned the rule of law for the rule of Trump. The only remaining question is how we can and will resist the unlawful and authoritarian actions of his administration.
Sam Atwood
Claremont
Readers’ comments: May 2, 2025