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Terry Torgerson

Truth and Reconciliation

Editor:

Thank you NCJ, Tamara McFarland and Jerry Rohde, (“Yes, They Are Racist. Now What?” and “This is Their Land,” respectively, Sept. 1), for acknowledging that we are all beneficiaries of historic violence and corruption, (commensurate with our individual class-status), and for suggesting modest penance, modeling an intact conscience.

Only truth and reconciliation commissions have proven effective in averting human civilization’s recurring cycle of collapse at the hands of oligarchs and every community’s wannabes dominating societies to maintain their outdated industries, technologies and “trickle-down economics” ideology until it’s too late, (Tragedy and Hope, Georgetown University historian Carroll Quigley); recurring today with fossil fuels, healthcare, housing, education and transportation, despite mounting, self-destructive human consequences.

In Gangsters of Capitalism, Jonathan Katz documents the repressed conscience of America’s infamous, hard-drinking cabal of political, military and industry elites who expanded corrupt and violent seizures of Native lands into worldwide looting, inspiring Mark Twain’s Anti-Imperialist League and desperate passage of prohibition, culminating in oligarch’s unbridled financial speculation, an international depression, WWII, today’s terrorist blowback; refugees at our southern border and nuclear brinkmanship.

Resurgent fascism, (defined by Franz Fanon as, “colonialism within a traditionally colonialist society”), is inevitable following 40 years of bipartisan bureaucratic violence divesting from essential public services, herding millions of abandoned youths and adults into the multi-billion dollar prison industrial complex of mass incarceration, aka, “free labor.”

Whether it’s congenital, abuse of alcohol, pharmaceuticals, the dysfunctional behavior of abuse-survivors, or the promise of inflated salaries, titles and pensions, individuals’ repressed conscience is essential to entrenched elites’ violent, corrupt and self-destructive greed.

Until America’s long-overdue truth and reconciliation commission is implemented, every community deserves and can demand sane and sober public bureaucrats by instituting pre-employment psychological/behavioral testing and policies requiring rehabilitation for high-functioning psychotics and alcoholics ... epidemics trivialized by their familiarity. George Clark, Eureka

No Respect

Editor:

My take-away from news regarding our local state university is that the new regime of Cal Poly Humboldt is continuing the old HSU regime’s imperial disregard for our community (“Cal Poly Paid Triple Appraised Value in Land Purchase,” Sept. 1).

In January of 2022, a local nonprofit with plans to build senior housing signed a letter of intent to purchase 12 acres of a 16-acre lot owned by two local businesses, Danco and Sun Valley Floral Farms, for $3 million. However: weaponizing two-thirds of a billion dollar grant from the California State University system, Cal Poly initiated a covert deal with the owners that culminated March 22 when Cal Poly placed