Time to speak up
EDITOR: Many Cloverdalians have probably heard about the vandalism of a car last Friday night on Main Street. A swastika was sprayed on the hood of a local citizen’s car, owned by a three-generation family of French, Japanese and Italian descent. While one can question the defiler’s motivation, intent or even their seriousness, at the end of the day only one fact remains: this is racism, specifically, Nazi racism — and it happened in Cloverdale.
You cannot dismiss the swastika as just a kid’s prank — ask any survivor of the Holocaust, whether they are Jewish, gypsy, Slav, Polish, Ukrainian, physically-disabled or gay whether they would chuckle when they see a swastika. So, as a fourth generation Irish-American whose ancestors fled their native land during the famine and who wrote of ditches filled with the dying and dead who tried to survive by eating grass while the food they grew was being exported out of their country for sale by their English overlords, I learned that hatred of the “other” ends only in the destruction of the human spirit and human lives.
As a gay man, I witnessed close friends and neighbors die of AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s, stigmatized, harassed and feared while information and medicine which could have eased their lives — and prevented the further spread of the disease — was deliberately withheld by a contemptuous government and indifferent medical industry, I came to implicitly believe, as the activist group ACT-UP coined, that silence=death.
Now, as a gay man happily living in Cloverdale, married to a Jewish man who lost family in the Holocaust, I have to watch my husband recoil from this vandalism event and whisper to me that he is afraid. This is, to me, the hardest and most heartbreaking part of the whole sad, sordid business.
I say enough. I ask that the Cloverdale city leaders and community uphold and affirm the reasons why so many of us make this great place our home: a community which actively engages in making things better for all, which has a steadfast belief and commitment to the principles of equity and justice and which performs the hard, heartbreaking and often thankless work of democracy to ensure a home where all can feel at home and safe. I respectfully ask our city leaders to publicly condemn this act and any others which seek to harass, intimidate or diminish the value of any of our neighbors.
Jack Fitzsimmons, Cloverdale
Pavelkas not retiring
EDITOR: Thank you for the nice piece last week announcing the sale of North County Property Management. I have had many people come up to us on the street and congratulate us and a few of them have asked, “How do we like retirement?” I have replied with the standard answer, “I wouldn’t know, as we are moving full steam ahead” in our real estate business and relationship with Pacific Union. I hope this settles some confusion as we look forward to serving the community of Cloverdale for several years to come.
Jane and Ron Pavelka, Cloverdale
