How about a joint message on violence?
Reading last Friday’s editorials on the Times opinion page and Free Press opinion page about the continuing political violence around our country, I was struck by their shared sentiments but different ways they arrived at their conclusions. The Times called on the right to calm down, while the Free Press expressed that the left should cool off.
If the rival Times and Free Press could come together years ago to produce one newspaper for the Chattanooga region, couldn’t the editorial page editors do the same and write a joint statement providing an example and leadership to reduce the political temperature here and around America?
Daniel Duncan
Hixson
Cretins’ power source is only government
If you view any of the cretins on TikTok and elsewhere who are giggling and giddy over Charlie Kirk’s murder, then you know that “The X-Files” are for real, not just science fiction. There are aliens among us, and they are not “E.T.” What can one call them but aliens? To be human, you must possess at least a shred of humanity and decency — and these “creatures” have neither.
Like him or not, Kirk used ideas and persuasion, not force, to make his viewpoints known. Though they claim intellectual superiority, the left hates rational debate, because in the “battle of ideas” — they are unarmed. So, leftists resort to weapons they say they’d like to ban, since they can’t fight with logic. Hmm, very “intellectual” of them.
To this leftist cadre, the only “higher power” they recognize is the alphabet soup of three-letter agencies in Washington, D.C.
Kirk put his faith in a much higher power source — also three letters.
Tony Scott
Signal Mountain
Trump elephant in room on violence
Re: assassination of Charlie Kirk. The New York Times, among many others, reminds us that we should turn down the volume. The Wall Street Journal tells us that this is an opportunity for leadership. I would submit that the elephant in the room is Donald Trump.
In all my 80 years, I remember no president — Republican or Democrat — who spewed an almost daily discourse of mean-spirited, hateful rhetoric and name-calling.
If one disagrees with him, he is automatically the enemy.
As I recall, he laughed at Paul Pelosi’s severe head injury.
Political violence has come to both parties. The volume must be turned down. But leadership is required. Will it come from Trump? I wish I had confidence that it would … but I don’t.
Nancy Bishop
Talking and listening should be response
Just imagine talking and listening as a response to tragedy — a radical thought that deserves consideration. The assassination of Charlie Kirk offers an opportunity to think about how we move forward in today’s toxic environment.
Right now we scream at each other but have developed — or rather decided — to “not” listen. We need to take time and figure out how to listen.
Irwin Ginsburg