YOU GODLESS HEATHENS

WHAT PURPOSE does it serve your paper to criticize a fellow publication with a mocking cartoon? This type of clever negativity feeds your own ego but at what polarizing impact to the community? If you truly desire to reflect life in Santa Cruz, perhaps you should have considered rejecting the cartoon as a cheap shot as it doesn't represent the attitude of tolerance and mutual respect this community promotes and encourages.

Is "Growing Up in Santa Cruz" your next target? They actually had Jewish girls and their rabbi reading the Holy Scriptures on their cover this week.

Santa Cruz is home to people of all faiths or no faith. And that's good. And a responsible newspaper reports the news and activities of all its readers, not just those who best fit the stereotypical liberal Santa Cruzan. Like it or not, there are people who follow Jesus, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha and a variety of other deities in SC and they are all entitled to accurate coverage of their participation in and contribution to Santa Cruz. Personal attacks and vengeful criticism like those contained in this cartoon serve no one with the possible exception of the creator as he publicly unloads some frustration or personal grievance.

If DeCinzo doesn't like the content, direction or leadership of the Sentinel, he is not forced to read it. He has the choice to gather his local news by other means. The time he spent being creatively critical of others could be better spent improving his own work. Building up takes a lot more discipline and talent then tearing down.

Please give us more articles like "The Hole Truth" (Cover Story, July 9). This piece served the community and may even build relationships that will improve or change lives. Please publish this level of constructive journalism and limit anything that tears down other people or their beliefs.

 Marilyn Olson,
Scotts Valley

MY GODLESS GRATITUDE

I HAVE just one thing to say in response to Stephen DeCinzo's cartoon in 'Letters' (July 9-16): "THANK YOU."

Jerry Danzig,
Santa Cruz

WALLOWING IN WASTE

RELAX, everybody. Seven to eight tons of crap left on the beach (post-Independence Day) is the new "clean." Never been this good, says Save Our Shores, desperately spinning rank seaweed into gold.

How did we get here, from a biblical concept of absolute unacceptability vis-à-vis fouling our own nest, to this look-on-the-bright-side concession that, hey, it coulda' been worse? To somehow rationalize that this year's trashfest constitutes an "improvement" (over last year's 20-ton stupidness) only confirms my sad but inescapable belief that we are the most invasive weeds on the planet, ever resourceful, ever ready to crowd out and defile the natural.

Even so, God bless the clean-up volunteers--they understand the Big Idea of leaving only footprints in the sand. And God bless Save Our Shores for caring way more than an amusing-ourselves-to-death populace.

Tim Rudolph,
Ben Lomond

WERE MISSIONARIES REALLY SO BAD?

REGARDING your June 25 issue and the cover story titled "Deconstructing Roxas" by Geoffrey Dunn: When our own adventurous and ambitious ancestors conquered the West they did their share of brutality and exploitation. There was also brutality carried on between tribes and brutality by the Indians against missions, as well. Missions, while backed by the Spanish Crown, were composed of men who had little to gain and much to risk--a few recognized as martyrs and saints, such as Junipero Serra who walked incalculable distances between missions in spite of a persistent and painful leg infection. If the Indians were exploited by the Spanish Crown then so were the missionaries. What undoubtedly both the Indians and missionaries shared was mutual contradictory human nature, which could in turn be brotherly or barbarous (on either side) as accounts have also proven.

Mr. Dunn states: "a substantial percentage of California Indians had been wiped out by the mission system." There were in the area, also, Russian fur traders, explorers, Spaniards (later Mexicans and us Americans) bringing disease, exploitation, alcohol and corruption. The missions may have contributed to some degree in the Indians "being wiped out," but without overly "romanticizing," it is clearly evident that the resulting fusion of Indian and missionary aptitudes produced considerable order, transcendent artwork and combined spirituality that supercedes and fortunately annuls all the hoaxes, myths and misinformation bandied about.

Norma Wolff,
Santa Cruz

Correction

The picture running on pages 22 and 23 in our July 16 Cover Story 'Toward the Light' was not of a nurse at Dominican, it was of a medical assistant at an unrelated oncology clinic. We apologize for the error.

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