Letters to the editor for Feb. 2
Bypass the middleman
I read in The Olympian of Jan. 23 that our state has budgeted $625 million over two years to combat homelessness. An estimate was posited of 10,000 homeless statewide. That’s over $31,000 spending per homeless person per year! Yet, after that money gets spent, there will most likely still be 10,000 homeless reported out there.
Can we not locate that percentage of our homeless willing to go into drug, alcohol, or mental health treatment and/or job training? Then give those folks some of that $62,500 per person as a housing voucher as long as they stay on their rehab/training program. I read Seattle alone had spent $100 million on homeless programs but their homelessness crisis is worse than ever. Whatever the $100 million was spent on, it didn’t work.
Concentrating more of the funds on those who are ready to change might be the best approach over time.
Anti-Semitic symbols: remove but do not destroy
Thank you for the story of the court case in Germany (Ugly anti-Semitic remnant at center of court battle, Jan. 17) in which the plaintiff, Michael Duellmann, argues that the Judensau (“Jewish pig”) monument on the outer wall of the Town Church in Wittenberg be removed. He claims, rightly, that it “is a terrible falsification of Judaism ... a defamation of and insult to the Jewish people.”
Mr. Duellmann is correct. The irony is this: People on all sides of this court case agree that this piece of masonry is absolutely repugnant, an offense not only to Jewish people, but to all people of good will.
Although part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it should be removed, as should the more than two dozen similar anti-Semitic monuments that were built into the walls of European churches from the 13th century.
But it should not be destroyed. Neither should it be placed in the Luther House Museum, as Mr. Duellmann apparently demands. Like all of these hideous monuments, this one pre-dates Luther and the Reformation by a couple of centuries.
In recent times, Americans have wrestled with dubious symbols from their own history, What, for example, should happen to the Confederate flag and the statues of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and others? We have removed them from places of prominence, but we have not destroyed them. In agreement with the Rev. Johannes Block, pastor of the Town Church in Wittenberg, “we cannot simply forget the darker side of our history.”