Lincoln Park
Lincoln Park
I am one of the people who is parking on Kinoole Street alongside Lincoln Park. I am doing this as a supporter not a protester. This community effort is one of support and advocacy for peaceful park experiences.
I support the experience of driving by or spending time in our public parks without subjection to religious ranting and violent images.
The depiction of mutilated bodies is profoundly disrespectful to the dead, as well as traumatizing to the living — men, women and particularly children.
I am grateful to Heather Kimball and Karen Nishimoto for initiating this positive parking effort. If we take up all the parking slots, there will be no room for those who come with offensive ranting, signage and photos.
I realize this is not a long-term solution, but it is a beginning for those of us who for years have turned the other cheek, but now feel that we must do something proactive for community and aloha.
Jeri Gertz
Hilo
GMO ‘red herring’
Richard Ha’s otherwise rational and informative June 30 letter (Tribune-Herald, Your Views) is badly flawed by his reference to a common GMO “red herring.” He is correct in stating that, to date, no credible body of data supports food safety concerns relating to GMOs.
But the more important issues with GMOs are, at this point in time, not nutrition or food safety. They are corporate control, patent law and industrial agriculture/monoculture.
For example, his suggestion that GMOs can limit the use of herbicides has not been demonstrated. Resistance to Roundup (glyphosate) is one of the most common traits given to popular GMO crops. This has resulted in wholesale, high-volume aerial delivery of glyphosate, now a suspected carcinogen.
I should also mention that random “weeds” in anyone’s back yard can now constitute a violation of patent law even if they are the unintended product of GMO seed from composting or random scattering. This is a perverse consequence of Monsanto’s big-budget lobbying for inappropriate patent law accommodation.
Your focus on and possibly premature dismissal of food safety concerns sidesteps currently more important issues regarding GMOs and discredits your otherwise admirable position.
Robert Lee
Hilo