Letters to the Editor: Long Island Press Readers React
No to Casino at Coliseum Site
The proposed construction of a casino at the site of Nassau Veterans Coliseum in the predominantly Black and Brown community of Uniondale, New York, would be a destructive decision that could negatively impact neighboring Hofstra University, Nassau Community College, and the Sloan Kettering Cancer Center Nassau.
Casinos have long-term colleagues such as gambling addiction, crime, and prostitution, that are not in the best interest of the residents of Nassau County, the students at Hofstra University, and Nassau Community College. As well as the struggling cancer patients at Sloan Kettering Cancer Center Nassau. This effort could rob, rape, and ruin the lives of many broken, battered, and bruised Nassau County residents, students from home and abroad, and cancer patients, fighting the forward fight to survive.
Efforts to weaken the Black and Brown vote through redistricting in America’s largest township, the Town of Hempstead, and one of America’s richest counties, Nassau County, literally adds insult to injury. The corrupt trinity of environmental racism, classism, and sexism, baptized in pure greed wants possession of the very soul of our beloved township and county. The concerned residents of the Town of Hempstead and Nassau County must stand up, speak up, and seriously fight the forward fight for our future and survival.
-Pastor Arthur L. Mackey Jr., Senior Pastor at Mount Sinai Baptist Church Cathedral
Santos Unresponsive, Unfit to Serve
I’m a resident of Glen Cove and therefore a constituent of George Santos. I’m a registered Independent, I’ve sent Mr. Santos three emails to his official congressional office, and have yet to have a response.
Mr. Santos claims that his fabrications have nothing to do with how he’ll serve his district, yet he doesn’t have the decency to answer my emails to him, wherein I specifically asked him a question. If he ignores all his constituents this way then there is no possibility that he serving this district and it’s population in a positive way.
-Barry Wetcher
The Lesson of George Santos
Maybe it’s taken the election of George Santos to Congress to bring the message home that we need to do our homework before we cast our vote. Although his constituents rally for his resignation and investigation into campaign finance continues, he continues to surprise us daily and his most recent move is to co-sponsor legislation to make the deadly AR-15 assault rifle the National Gun of our country. We have no one to blame but ourselves: we didn’t cast informed votes. We took the easy road.
In our busy world and bombarded with information, we’ve become a sound byte society. One of the downsides is that we miss the due diligence that plays an important role in our elections. We vote red. We vote blue. We vote without being certain of what a candidate stands for, what issues are most important to him/her and where they stand on the issues that are important to us individually. It’s time to sound the alarm and rally for debate and disclosure.
Although George Santos was not running in my congressional district, he well could have been.
I am a board member of the League of Women Voters of Huntington; we are a non-partisan organization whose mission is to promote fair elections and provide access to voter information. Few of the candidates in our district participated in debate with the LWV or elsewhere. Very few candidates responded to an annual survey for voter information, asking all candidates the same questions that are posted under Vote411.org, a website where voters can compare their answers and make informed choices when they go to the polls. When candidates refuse to participate, when their political party allows them to remain silent, how are we to make an informed choice?
We as voters need to put in the work. We also need to demand from our political parties that candidates are vetted and agree to participate in debates and position sharing. And if we don’t, George Santos won’t be the exception, he’ll have plenty of company.
-Barbara McCabe Raisch
