Mailbag

Hey ‘Weekly,’ Why Was There No Green on the Cover?

Your cover picture (Oct. 15) was missing a city council candidate.
Could it be that Mary DeCamp, the Green Party candidate in Ward 3, is
so far ahead in her thinking there was no room to stylistically
represent her position on the two-party money-laden scale you chose to
show?

The Green Party is looking at global issues—planetary climate
change, a crumbling federal economy, and an unraveling of our social
fabric—and advancing local solutions for dealing with these
challenges: retrofitting our homes for energy savings, adopting a local
currency, and fully implementing community-based policing in
conjunction with an audit of the police, fire and safety
departments.

My Green message demonstrates vision, practicality and fiscal
responsibility. The two major party candidates in Ward 3 are spending
fortunes to produce and send forth slick ads that say little and
ultimately end up in the landfills. My campaign expenses constitute a
small fraction of Karin’s and Ben’s war chests, and I have stayed on
the political high road by sticking with pro-active solutions instead
of reactive negative sound bites.

That, it seems to me, is the real news story if we are looking for a
positive change in Tucson city politics.

Mary DeCamp
Tucson City County Green Party Candidate

Want to Save the Tucson Economy, Long-Term? Vote Yes on School Overrides

I don’t have any children, and I don’t know that I ever will. Plus,
I’m in the process of buying my first house. Next year, I will pay
property taxes, making me responsible for any additional funding to
ensure full-day kindergarten, technology upgrades, librarians, school
counselors and the arts for other people’s children.

So I couldn’t really care less about funding our public schools. And
yet, I care more than I can express.

Since I moved to Tucson five years ago, I’ve been an active
participant in Rotary Reading Seed, spending an average of six to eight
hours a week volunteering to ensure that other people’s children learn
to love reading. This is a tall order in a district where some schools
do not have the budget to hire a single librarian.

Never mind the multiple studies pegging student performance to
available library staff, or the connection between the arts and
scholastic achievement. Never mind that it’s been 17 years since
Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities demonstrated that school
funding directly impacts students’ ability to learn and a community’s
ability to thrive, or that students without computer skills will be
unable to compete at all in the 21st century. Never mind that Arizona
ranked well below the national average on teacher salaries and
per-capita educational spending before our budget was slashed
and slashed again. People who support education already know this. The
Tucson citizens who voted against last year’s budget override probably
don’t care.

It’s true that voting to support our public schools will raise your
property taxes, by approximately $69.14 per year for the owner of a
$100,000 home.

What about the cost of not funding our public schools?
Teenagers are more likely to drop out of underfunded schools. Dropouts
are more likely to require public assistance, abuse drugs and turn to
crime.

Proposition 401 and 402 are not about other people’s kids. They are
about our quality. We need to fund full-day kindergarten, increased
technology, librarians, counselors and the arts so we do not find
ourselves, 10 years from now, in a crime-ridden city full of angry,
hopeless, ignorant people. If we continue to fail our students and our
public schools, we compromise our own prosperity.

Tucson needs to encourage the development of biotech and
alternative-energy companies, but without educational funding, the
children of Tucson will not be qualified for these fields. Further,
intelligent, educated people do not want to move to cities where their
children cannot attend adequate schools. Intelligent, educated people
do not want to move to dangerous neighborhoods where their neighbors
are hostile toward education.

In short: Voting against education is voting against maintaining the
worth of your assets. Societies that refuse to fund public education
are shooting themselves in the foot.

Whoever you are, wherever you are, please vote for the budget
override. Yes on Prop 401 and Prop 402.

Monica Friedman

Founding Fathers Would Despise Prop 200

If our founding fathers were alive today, they’d be banging on the
lids of their coffins, shouting, “Let us out of here; we have to stop
the Public Safety First Initiative folks in Tucson. We wanted limited
government and fiscal conservatism, and we want elected officials to
live within their means.”

We’re in the worst economic shape since the Great Depression. The
federal government is $60 trillion in debt, the state $4 billion in the
red, the county about $100 million short, and the city of Tucson about
$48 million short.

The proponents of Prop 200 think it’s OK to take another $164
million per year from city and county taxpayers to pay for more cops,
firefighters, lawyers, judges, corrections officers, support
facilities, equipment and staff, etc.

Generational theft is rampant. We seem to forget that one day, we
will be in nursing homes, relying on our kids and grandkids to provide
for us. Instead of keeping them happy, we’ll send them a bill for
several hundred thousand dollars for items they received little or no
benefit from. This will lead to the death panels many fear!

Let’s let our founding fathers rest in peace. Vote NO on Prop
200.

Tom Sander

‘She Was My Brother’ Swept Me Up

We live just outside of Phoenix and made a special effort to see
She Was My Brother in Tucson, and we were not disappointed
(“Notes, Not Chords,” Performing Arts, Oct. 1). In fact, we were
completely engaged during the show and discussed it at length during
our two-hour drive home. Our measure of a solid play: Does it give us
something to talk about and something to think about? For us, She
Was My Brother did it all.

Typically I look for a play to deliver a story with strong
characters in critical conflict, which this play did not. Instead, this
play very sensitively presented two people from starkly differently
cultures and orientations who very slowly grew to know each other, and
allowed their souls and ultimately their hearts to touch—during a
century that historically lacked tolerance and understanding.

The play was so carefully and delicately drawn that I felt myself
swept up in their seduction. At moments, I felt that I was witnessing
very intimate moments between two quite vulnerable human beings. No,
this play was not a typical play with hard edges and clear
delineations. Instead, this play provided an emotional experience
filled with subtle insights.

Richard Warren

Correction

Due to incorrect information from a source, we reported in “Girls
Make Their Moves” (City Week, Oct. 15) that All Queens Chess Day was
Tucson’s first all-female chess tournament. Other female chess
tournaments have taken place here in the past. We apologize for the
error.

This article appears in Oct 22-28, 2009.