Editorial

What the county’s Board of Supervisors hoped would be a sleepy little single-issue election on June 2 for the Measure A county sales tax increase is turning out to be anything but.

Yes, why do we care about them? With so much in this world to care about, why do we care if a baseball team wins or loses? Clearly, many of us care, millions and millions of us. My cousins drove in from Fresno for the games. Others come from Sacramento and points east. There are identified groups from far north of here at the ballpark: Ukiah, Fort Bragg and I think I saw a contingent from Arcata once.

It’s hard for me to imagine what it is like to be a young black man and to be the object of suspicion, fear and harassment for being myself, for being young and black. Our president says he knows what it’s like and that Trayvon Martin, the black teenager killed by a white neighborhood watch volunteer could have been him when he was a teenager. The boys assailant, George Zimmerman, was tried and acquitted and as far as I’m concerned, that is legally the end of the matter. But I can’t help wondering what it was like for Trayvon Martin, what it was like for Barack Obama, and what it was and is like for millions of young black men.

Gas prices have recently started to edge down below $3 a gallon.

Supporting McCaffery

Editor: I am sorry I was not able to attend the November 2nd

As members of the Fitch Mountain Association we recently received two emails from the association’s current secretary Ellen Silge regarding the recent tree and brush removal along North and South Fitch Mountain Road. She refers to the work as a “Roadside Slaughter.” She continues that Laura Tietz of Fire Free Fitch “is close to learning the identity of the PG&E person responsible” and “turning the inmate crew loose on Fitch Mt. Road.” Silge also said that “She (Tietz) has a meeting tomorrow (2/23) in Mike McGuire’s office with county officials who are interested in making the roads on the mountain safer and she’ll bring up this problem, as well as following through with PG&E executives and Cal-Fire. Silge finishes with a request from any property owner who feels that they suffered property damage caused by “the slaughter in progress or aftermath images.”